Blood pressure (BP) is one of the most important physiological parameters that can provide valuable information for personal health care. There are two ways to measure human blood pressure viz. invasive and noninvasive methods. Though invasive methods have been known to measure BP continuously and accurately but they are extremely inconvenient to use and might cause infection. The widely used cuff-based noninvasive methods are also not very convenient to use especially for injured or obese people and infants. Thus, there has been an unmet need for a convenient noninvasive cuffless BP measurement technique. While cuffless methods to measure BP have been previously studied, most of them were limited to offline processing of captured signals and none have presented an end-to-end prototype. Therefore, in this paper, we present a simple and lowcost fully realized implementation that can measure Blood Pressure immediately after capturing heart activity signals from a user namely PPG (Photoplethysmograph) and PCG (Phonocardiogram). The data is transmitted through a Bluetooth module in the system and results are displayed in a user interactive android application. We compared our results with those measured using a commercial cuff-based digital blood pressure measuring device and obtained encouraging results of about 95% accuracy.
Introduction: There is a lack of published safety information on the use of natural health products (NHPs) for patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) or renal transplant. Objective: To create an online database to provide evidence-based safety recommendations for commonly used NHPs, specific to patients with CKD or renal transplant. Methods: NHPs used by CKD and transplant patients in British Columbia were identified from the records of the BC Provincial Renal Agency. For each NHP, several databases (MEDLINE, Embase, LexiNatural Products, PubMed Dietary Supplement Subset, and Natural Medicines) were searched for any information pertaining to dosage, adverse drug reactions, drug interactions, immunomodulatory effects, and pharmacokinetics in patients with renal disease. Each NHP was given 1 of 4 safety ratings: likely safe, possibly safe, possibly unsafe, and likely unsafe. An NHP was classified as "possibly unsafe" for patients with renal transplant if it had demonstrated in vitro immunomodulatory effects and/or significant interactions with transplant medications due to effects on the cytochrome P450 3A4 isozyme. Results: Of the 19 627 BC-registered patients with renal disease (as of August 2014), 4122 (21%) were using one or more NHPs. The Herbal-CKD website (www.herbalckd.com) was created in 2015 to provide information about 47 commonly used NHPs and 2 known nephrotoxins (aristolochic acid and silver). This website provides a systematic evaluation of safety information for selected NHPs for patients with CKD (both nondialysis and dialysis-dependent) and kidney transplant. The most common NHP safety classification was "possibly safe", reflecting the paucity of studies in renal populations and the availability of safety data for the general population. Limitations of the website include difficulty in interpreting and generalizing the safety literature because most NHP formulations are not standardized, and others are combination products. Conclusion: The website www.herbalckd.com provides an easy-to-use, evidence-based tool for health care professionals to assess the safety of NHPs for CKD and transplant patients.
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