Cuff-Less Blood Pressure Monitoring System Using Smartphones

Recently, smartphones with mobile health applications have become promising tools in the healthcare industry due to their convenience, ubiquity for patients, and the ability to gather data in real time. In this paper, we propose a novel non-invasive, portable, and cuff-less method for monitoring BP by only using the smartphones' camera. Our experiment uses pulse transit time (PTT) between two separate photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals to estimate the subjects' systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Our proposed method first measures the subject's PPG signals from his/her index fingers using the smartphones' camera. Then, filtering and peak detection algorithms of the proposed method reduce the motion and noise artifacts in the PPG signals. Finally, the proposed method estimates SBP and DBP based on a linear regression model which was trained and tested on 30 trials with six healthy subjects. We evaluated the proposed method by comparing BP values of the proposed method with those of the reference (or gold-standard) device in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), standard deviation of error (SD), and R-squared (R²) value of the cross-validation. Experimental results show that the proposed method estimates the average of MAE ± SD is 2.07 ± 2.06 mm Hg for SBP estimation, and 2.12 ± 1.85 mm Hg for DBP estimation. These estimates are lower than accurate BP estimation standard (5 ± 8 mmHg).