A New Approach on Digital Blood Pressure Measurement Method for u-Healthcare Systems

Abstract

The traditional blood pressure measurement method so called Kortokoff method has to apply strong air pressure on patient's artery that could give severe damage on artery, and has the problem that method cannot measure the blood pressure in a series or continuously. But recent engineering technology can give new solutions that can solve the problems by using digital sensors and microcomputer. In this paper, we proposed a kind of non-Kortokoff method that can get the blood pressure from patient's digitalized arterial pulse waveform analysis without air pressure on patient's artery. This method can check patient's blood pressure in a series through converting the continuous arterial pulse waveform into the absolute systolic and diastolic values with pre-defined blood pressure mapping equation from experiments. The experimental results showed that the proposed non-Kortokoff blood pressure measurement method has very good accuracy over 95% compare to commercial tonometers in continuous measurement. Also, the proposed non-Kortokoff blood pressure measurement method can be designed and implemented as a small device since it has no mechanical air pressure compartment, and applied on the u-Healthcare service areas very effectively such as a digital blood pressure checker for usual life blood pressure monitoring along with the medical device for home and hospitals.