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

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 \u3e90% and correlations \u3e0.90 (P \u3c .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