M-Health: The Development of Cuff-less and Wearable Blood Pressure Meters for Use in Body Sensor Networks

To meet the needs of the increasingly aging population, development of wearable medical devices and body sensor networks technologies for applications in telemedicine and mobile health are imperative. In this direction, we have developed a cuff-less and noninvasive pulse transit time (PTT)-based approach to overcome the shortcomings of conventional invasive or cuff-based blood pressure (BP) measurement techniques for long-term and continuous measurement of BP and its variability. The technique is useful for designing wearable BP meters, which, if connected with various types of wearable devices by a body sensor network, could form a front-end infrastructure for long-term personal health monitoring. In this paper, we evaluated the PTT-based approach with data collected from two groups of 85 subjects. The results suggested that the PTT-based approach is a promising technique for the noninvasive and cuff-less measurement of BP.