Estimation of Blood Pressure and Pulse Transit Time Using Your Smartphone

It is widely recognized today that there is an alarming rise of lifestyle-induced chronic diseases (e.g., type II diabetes) in our society. Therefore, a strong need exists for cost-effective and non-invasive devices that can measure blood pressure (BP) to monitor, diagnose and follow-up patients at risk, but also healthy population in general. One promising method for arterial BP estimation is to measure a surrogate marker of it, such as, Pulse Transit Time (PTT) and derive pressure values from it. However, current methods for measuring PTT require complex sensing and analysis circuitry and the related medical devices are expensive and inconvenient for the user to wear. In this paper, we present a new smartphone-based method to estimate PTT reliably and subsequently BP from the baseline sensors on smartphones. This new approach involves determining PTT by simultaneously measuring the time the blood leaves the heart, by recording the heart sound using the standard microphone of the phone and the time it reaches the finger, by measuring the pulse wave using the phone’s camera. Moreover, we also describe algorithms that can be executed directly on current smartphones to obtain clean and robust heart sound signals and to extract the pulse wave characteristics using smartphones. We also present methods to ensure a synchronous capture of the waveforms, which is essential to obtain reliable PTT values with inexpensive sensors. Our experiments show that the computational overhead of the proposed two-phase processing method is minimum, with the ability to reliably measure the PTT values in a fully accurate (beat-to-beat) fashion using directly state-of-the-art smartphones as medical devices.