Methodological Role of Mathematics to Estimate Human Blood Pressure Through Biosensors

This paper presents a non-invasive technique and cuff less method for blood pressure measurement with a hardware prototype implementation. The sophisticated feature called pulse transit time (PTT) is extracted and investigated with a development of a smart system which consists of ECG, PPG sensor to estimate the systolic and diastolic blood pressure with support of advanced signal processing methodologies. The proposed method experiments have been carried out in hospital environment and tested with real time patients to validate the proposed method. The maximum error percentage of the proposed system has been shown to be 5.3% of systolic blood pressure (mmHg) and 4.7% of diastolic blood pressure (mmHg). This system also allows the monitoring of patient hypertension and overcome the limitation of cuff-based hospitalized measurement system

Blood pressure estimation with complexity features from electrocardiogram and photoplethysmogram signals

A novel method for the continual, cuff-less estimation of the systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) values based on signal complexity analysis of the photoplethysmogram (PPG) and the electrocardiogram (ECG) is reported. The proposed framework estimates the blood pressure (BP) values obtained from signals generated from 14 volunteers subjected to a series of exercise routines. Herein, the physiological signals were first pre-processed, followed by the extraction of complexity features from both the PPG and ECG. Subsequently the complexity features were used in regression models (artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM) and LASSO) to predict the BP. The performance of the approach was evaluated by calculating the mean absolute error and the standard deviation of the predicted results and compared with the recommendations made by the British Hypertension Society (BHS) and Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation. Complexity features from the ECG and PPG were investigated independently, along with the combined dataset. It was observed that the complexity features obtained from the combination of ECG and PPG signals resulted to an improved estimation accuracy for the BP. The most accurate DBP result of 5.15 ± 6.46 mmHg was obtained from ANN model, and SVM generated the most accurate prediction for the SBP which was estimated as 7.33 ± 9.53 mmHg. Results for DBP fall within recommended performance of the BHS but SBP is outside the range. Although initial results are promising, further improvements are required before the potential of this approach is fully realised

Wearable Technologies and AI at the Far Edge for Chronic Heart Failure Prevention and Management: A Systematic Review and Prospects

Smart wearable devices enable personalized at-home healthcare by unobtrusively collecting patient health data and facilitating the development of intelligent platforms to support patient care and management. The accurate analysis of data obtained from wearable devices is crucial for interpreting and contextualizing health data and facilitating the reliable diagnosis and management of critical and chronic diseases. The combination of edge computing and artificial intelligence has provided real-time, time-critical, and privacy-preserving data analysis solutions. However, based on the envisioned service, evaluating the additive value of edge intelligence to the overall architecture is essential before implementation. This article aims to comprehensively analyze the current state of the art on smart health infrastructures implementing wearable and AI technologies at the far edge to support patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). In particular, we highlight the contribution of edge intelligence in supporting the integration of wearable devices into IoT-aware technology infrastructures that provide services for patient diagnosis and management. We also offer an in-depth analysis of open challenges and provide potential solutions to facilitate the integration of wearable devices with edge AI solutions to provide innovative technological infrastructures and interactive services for patients and doctors

Unsupervised Heart-rate Estimation in Wearables With Liquid States and A Probabilistic Readout

Heart-rate estimation is a fundamental feature of modern wearable devices. In this paper we propose a machine intelligent approach for heart-rate estimation from electrocardiogram (ECG) data collected using wearable devices. The novelty of our approach lies in (1) encoding spatio-temporal properties of ECG signals directly into spike train and using this to excite recurrently connected spiking neurons in a Liquid State Machine computation model; (2) a novel learning algorithm; and (3) an intelligently designed unsupervised readout based on Fuzzy c-Means clustering of spike responses from a subset of neurons (Liquid states), selected using particle swarm optimization. Our approach differs from existing works by learning directly from ECG signals (allowing personalization), without requiring costly data annotations. Additionally, our approach can be easily implemented on state-of-the-art spiking-based neuromorphic systems, offering high accuracy, yet significantly low energy footprint, leading to an extended battery life of wearable devices. We validated our approach with CARLsim, a GPU accelerated spiking neural network simulator modeling Izhikevich spiking neurons with Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) and homeostatic scaling. A range of subjects are considered from in-house clinical trials and public ECG databases. Results show high accuracy and low energy footprint in heart-rate estimation across subjects with and without cardiac irregularities, signifying the strong potential of this approach to be integrated in future wearable devices.Comment: 51 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables, 95 references. Under submission at Elsevier Neural Network

Blood pressure estimation from photoplethysmogram and electrocardiogram signals using machine learning

Blood pressure measurement is a significant part of preventive healthcare and has been widely used in clinical risk and disease management. However, conventional measurement does not provide continuous monitoring and sometimes is inconvenient with a cuff. In addition to the traditional cuff-based blood pressure measurement methods, some researchers have developed various cuff-less and noninvasive blood pressure monitoring methods based on Pulse Transit Time (PTT). Some emerging methods have employed features of either photoplethysmogram (PPG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, although no studies to our knowledge have employed the combined features from both PPG and ECG signals. Therefore this study aims to investigate the performance of a predictive, machine learning blood pressure monitoring system using both PPG and ECG signals. It validates that the employment of the combination of PPG and ECG signals has improved the accuracy of the blood pressure estimation, compared with previously reported results based on PPG signal only. © 2018 Institution of Engineering and Technology. All rights reserved

H2B: Heartbeat-based Secret Key Generation Using Piezo Vibration Sensors

We present Heartbeats-2-Bits (H2B), which is a system for securely pairing wearable devices by generating a shared secret key from the skin vibrations caused by heartbeat. This work is motivated by potential power saving opportunity arising from the fact that heartbeat intervals can be detected energy-efficiently using inexpensive and power-efficient piezo sensors, which obviates the need to employ complex heartbeat monitors such as Electrocardiogram or Photoplethysmogram. Indeed, our experiments show that piezo sensors can measure heartbeat intervals on many different body locations including chest, wrist, waist, neck and ankle. Unfortunately, we also discover that the heartbeat interval signal captured by piezo vibration sensors has low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) because they are not designed as precision heartbeat monitors, which becomes the key challenge for H2B. To overcome this problem, we first apply a quantile function-based quantization method to fully extract the useful entropy from the noisy piezo measurements. We then propose a novel Compressive Sensing-based reconciliation method to correct the high bit mismatch rates between the two independently generated keys caused by low SNR. We prototype H2B using off-the-shelf piezo sensors and evaluate its performance on a dataset collected from different body positions of 23 participants. Our results show that H2B has an overwhelming pairing success rate of 95.6%. We also analyze and demonstrate H2B's robustness against three types of attacks. Finally, our power measurements show that H2B is very power-efficient

Bio-signal data gathering, management and analysis within a patient-centred health care context

The healthcare service is under pressure to do more with less, and changing the way the service is modelled could be the key to saving resources and increasing efficacy. This change could be possible using patient-centric care models. This model would include straightforward and easy-to-use telemonitoring devices and a flexible data management structure. The structure would maintain its state by ingesting many sources of data, then tracking this data through cleaning and processing into models and estimates to obtaining values from data which could be used by the patient. The system can become less disease-focused and more health-focused by being preventative in nature and allowing patients to be more proactive and involved in their care by automating the data management. This work presents the development of a new device and a data management and analysis system to utilise the data from this device and support data processing along with two examples of its use. These are signal quality and blood pressure estimation. This system could aid in the creation of patient-centric telecare systems