Affiliation:
1. Universidade do Porto, Portugal
2. University of Coimbra, Portugal
3. Philips Research Europe, The Netherlands
4. Unidade de Cardiologia e Medicina Fetal, Brazil
Abstract
Blood pressure monitoring is essential in hospital and home monitoring scenarios, with applications requiring on-line beat-to-beat blood pressure estimation, such as tele-monitoring of neurally mediated syncope. This chapter presents a comprehensive review of investigated approaches and reported performance, using different noninvasive correlates of the circulatory and cardiovascular system. Papers of interest were located in Scopus, IEEE Xplore and PubMed databases. The resulting pool of papers was then methodologically reviewed using 5 thematic taxonomies developed: 1) pulse arrival time and pulse transit time, 2) vascular transit time, 3) RS2 time, 4) heart sound characteristics, 5) PPG characteristics. The status of evidence in the literature demonstrates that cardiovascular signals such as the electrocardiogram, photoplethysmogram, and phonocardiogram contain important information for the estimation of blood pressure. Still, there are open issues regarding the validity, reliability and stability of these methods.