Advanced Electro-Optical Analysis of Photoplethysmogram Signal

Commonly used to monitor oxygen saturation, the pulse oximeter device can be exploited further than its primary function, using an advanced analysis of the optical sensor output signal. Due to its simplicity, the cost to diagnose patient's circulatory system disease becomes low, but the effort to process the recorded signal and analyze it becomes high. The pulse oximeter output signal contains information such as the blood oxygen concentration and the cardiac rhythm period. However, because of strong connections between the mechanical, optical and electrical proprieties, a lot of valuable information can be extracted regarding arterial blood pressure and arterial stiffness. Medical data of the cardiac abnormalities or the circulatory diseases can also be extracted. In this paper an advanced analysis describe the connection between pulse oximeter signal and mechanical, optical and electrical phenomena in order to determine blood pressure value.