Mobile Personal Healthcare System for Non-Invasive, Pervasive and Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring: A Feasibility Study

Authors

Luis J. Mena
Vanessa G. Felix
Rodolfo Ostos
Armando J. Gonzalez
Rafael Martinez-Pelaez
Jesus D. Melgarejo, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Gladys E. Maestre, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2020

Abstract

Background: Smartphone-based blood pressure (BP) monitor using photoplethysmogram (PPG) technology has emerged as a promising approach to empower users with self-monitoring for effective diagnosis and control ofhypertension (HT).

Objective: This study aimed to develop a mobile personal healthcare system for non-invasive, pervasive, and continuous estimation of BP level and variability to be user-friendly to elderly.

Methods: The proposed approach was integrated by a self-designed cuffless, calibration-free, wireless and wearable PPG-only sensor, and a native purposely-designed smartphone application using multilayer perceptron machine learning techniques from raw signals. We performed a pilot study with three elder adults (mean age 61.3 ± 1.5 years; 66% women) to test usability and accuracy of the smartphone-based BP monitor.

Results: The employed artificial neural network (ANN) model performed with high accuracy in terms of predicting the reference BP values of our validation sample (n=150). On average, our approach predicted BP measures with accuracy >90% and correlations >0.90 (P < .0001). Bland-Altman plots showed that most of the errors for BP prediction were less than 10 mmHg.

Conclusions: With further development and validation, the proposed system could provide a cost-effective strategy to improve the quality and coverage of healthcare, particularly in rural zones, areas lacking physicians, and solitary elderly populations.

Comments

© 2020 The authors. All rights reserved.

Recommended Citation

Mena, L. J., Félix, V. G., Ostos, R., González, A. J., Martínez-Peláez, R., Melgarejo, J. D., & Maestre, G. E. (2020). Mobile Personal Health Care System for Noninvasive, Pervasive, and Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring: Development and Usability Study. JMIR MHealth and UHealth, 8(7), e18012. https://doi.org/10.2196/18012

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

JMIR Mhealth and Uhealth

DOI

10.2196/18012

Academic Level

faculty

Mentor/PI Department

Office of Human Genetics