Portable hardware to enable continuous blood pressure monitoring utilising high-resolution flexible ultrasound arrays

This work presents the Slanj, a novel, portable system that enables the use of ultrasound (US) in wearable applications, specifically continuous, cuff-less and calibration-free blood pressure (BP) monitoring. The capabilities of the portable ultrasound hardware (PUH) Slanj are benchmarked against the research-standard Verasonics system. For that, both systems were utilised to track the cardiovascular dynamics at the radial artery using high lateral resolution, flexible, thin film, miniaturised, linear US arrays based on proprietary thin film technology. A set of 10 healthy volunteers were recruited to follow a protocol to measure (with a BP cuff) and predict (using ultrasound) BP at rest and an artificially induced elevated BP.