Challenges around Cuffless Wearable Blood Pressure Monitoring

Increased blood pressure — the highly prevalent hypertension syndrome — is the most common risk factor of myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, stroke, kidney failure and blindness. In the US 1 in 3 has hypertension and the total costs per year are $ 63.5 bln. State of the art devices for blood pressure monitoring are still mainly based on the sphygmo-manometric occlusive arm-cuff, which are clumsy, uncomfortable and allow only for intermittent measurements at intervals of several minutes. The talk deals with the pulse wave methodology that enables cuff-less blood pressure measurements, possibly at heartbeat-to-heartbeat level. The basic underlying theory, experimental results and current scientific challenges of this methodology will be presented.