Review of emerging methods and techniques for arterial pressure and flow waves acquisition and analyses

Abstract

Arterial blood pressure (AP) is the physical parameter that, together with body temperature, is the most frequently measured parameter in hospitals and at home for medical diagnostics purposes. The principles of the AP measurements are based on the physical mechanisms and techniques that originated in ancient Oriental medicine, then in the medieval times, and have been reinvented and improved in XIX -XX centuries. During the last decades the tendency to miniaturization, simplification, and automatization of the BP measurement devices with simultaneous rise in their sensitivity and reliability is observed.1–4 Recently more traditional medical devices have been implemented as mobile apps systems for everyday home monitoring of the body health parameters like temperature,5–7 glucose concentration,8-11 quality of sleep,12–13 attack of asthma14–16 or epilepsy,17 heart sounds18 and electrocardiogram,19 hemoglobin level20 or alcohol uptake21 in blood, and AP.22–25 Such applications are essential for health state monitoring in chronic patients, to prevent the asthma, epilepsy or heart attack, sleep apnea, hyperglycemic shock and other acute health states. Both standard clinical and personal mobile techniques have been developed based on the models of a standard healthy human being. 6,18 That is why their use in young or elderly individuals, patients with some specific disease, sportsmen and some other groups is conventional and produce non-repeatable and erroneous data. Therefore, the problem of sensitivity and reliability of the BP equipment and the physical principles used in them must be revisited and updated to satisfy more groups of patients and healthy individuals. In this paper a brief historical review of existing methods and physical principles of AP estimation is presented. Modern techniques for noninvasive BP measurements based on palpation (Riva-Rocci) and auscultation (Korotkoff) methods, and continuous noninvasive arterial pressure (CNAP) measurements photoplethysmography (PHP) and applanation tonometry (AT), their benefits and disadvantages are discussed. The existing Mobile Apps technologies and the results of their testing studies are presented, and the perspectives of their future development are circumscribed.