airBP: Monitor Your Blood Pressure with Millimeter-Wave in the Air

Abstract

Blood pressure (BP), an important vital sign to assess human health, is expected to be monitored conveniently. The existing BP monitoring methods, either traditional cuff based or newly emerging wearable based, all require skin contact, which may cause unpleasant user experience and is even injurious to certain users. In this article, we explore contactless BP monitoring and propose airBP, which emits millimeter-wave signals toward a user’s wrist, and captures the reflected signal bounded off from the pulsating artery underlying the wrist. By analyzing the reflected signal strength of the signal, airBP generates the arterial pulse and further estimates BP by exploiting the relationship between the arterial pulse and BP. To realize airBP, we design a new beam-forming method to keep focusing on the tiny and hidden wrist artery, by leveraging the inherent periodicity of the arterial pulse. Moreover, we custom design a pre-training and neural network architecture, to combat the challenges from the arterial pulse sparsity and ambiguity, so as to estimate BP accurately. We prototype airBP using a coin-size commercial off-the-shelf millimeter-wave radar and perform extensive experiments on 41 subjects. The results demonstrate that airBP accurately estimates systolic and diastolic BP, with a mean error of –0.30 mmHg and –0.23 mmHg, as well as a standard deviation error of 4.80 mmHg and 3.79 mmHg (within the acceptable range regulated by the FDA’s AAMI protocol), respectively, at a distance up to 26 cm.