Continuous blood pressure estimation based on multiple parameters from eletrocardiogram and photoplethysmogram by Back-propagation neural network

The cuff-less continuous blood pressure monitoring provides reliable and invaluable information about the individuals' health condition. Conventional sphygmomanometer with a cuff measures only the value of the blood pressure intermittently and the measurement process is sometimes inconvenient. In this work, a systematic approach with multi-parameter fusion has been proposed to estimate the non-invasive beat-to-beat systolic and diastolic blood pressure with high accuracy. The methods involve real-time monitoring of the electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG), and extracting the R peak from the ECG and relevant feature parameters from the synchronous PPG. Also, it covers the creation of the topological model of back-propagation neural network that has fifteen neurons in the input layer, ten neurons in the single interlayer, and two neurons in the output layer, where all the neurons are fully connected. As for the results, the proposed method was validated on the volunteers. The reference blood pressure (BP) is from Finometer (MIDI, Finapres Medical System, Netherlands). The results showed that the mean ± S.D. for the estimated systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) with the proposed method against reference were −0.41 ± 2.02 mmHg and 0.46 ± 2.21 mmHg, respectively. Thus, the continuous blood pressure algorithm based on Back-Propagation neural network provides a continuous BP with a high accuracy.