Continuous and long-term arterial blood pressure monitoring by using h-Shirt

Several studies found that the pattern of blood pressure (BP) over a 24-hour period can be a sensitive indicator to predict the outcome and end-organ damage accurately. However, conventional BP meters are unsuitable for measuring BP variation due to their measuring principle, which require an inflatable cuff. To solve this problem, a cuff-less, non-invasive and continuous BP measurement technique are required for 24-hour non-interrupt BP monitoring. Health Shirt (h-Shirt) developed in this study was shown to be one of the possible solution. In this paper, h-Shirt estimation ability was tested against finometer (Finapres Medical Systems, Netherlands) on 10 subjects before, during and after they were riding on a bicycle ergometer. Totally 15 minutes data was captured continuously. The pulse-transit-time capture from h-Shirt correlates with SBP and DBP from finometer by r = -0.77 and -0.51 respectively. In terms of BP value, the overall SBP and DBP difference are 11.29 and 7.15 mmHg respectively.