Blood Pressure and Heart Rate Variabilities Estimation Using Ballistocardiography

In this work a blood pressure and heart rate variability estimation system is presented. Instead of merely using beat-to-beat time interval extracted from the electrocardiogram (ECG), it is also used finger photoplethysmography (PPG) and ballistocardiography (BCG) information to have three independent estimates of the heart rate variability. Since pulse arrival and transit times can be extracted considering the acquired physiological waves, its correlation to blood pressure (BP) enables to obtain an estimation of BP variability for a particular subject, both from PPG and BCG. Given that BCG is extremely susceptible to movement artefacts, the system also infers context-related information as BCG detects subject’s motion and posture.