Personalized blood pressure estimation using multiview fusion information of wearable physiological signals and transfer learning

Continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring is crucial for individual health management, yet the significant inter-individual variations among patients pose challenges to achieving precision medicine. In response to this issue, we propose a parallel cross-hybrid architecture that integrates a convolutional neural network backbone and a Mix-Transformer backbone. This model, grounded in multi-view physiological signals and personalized fine-tuning strategies, aims to estimate BP, facilitating the capture of physiological information across diverse receptive fields and enhancing network expressive capabilities. Our proposed architecture exhibits superior performance in estimating systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure, with average absolute errors of 3.94 mmHg and 2.24 mmHg, respectively. These results surpass existing baseline models and align with the standards set by the British Hypertension Society, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for BP measurement. Additionally, this study explores a personalized model fine-tuning strategy by adjusting specific layers and incorporating individual information, presenting an optimal solution. The model's generalization ability is validated through transfer learning across databases (public and self-made). To enhance the proposed architecture's usability in wearable devices, this study employs a knowledge distillation strategy for model lightweighting, with preliminary application in our designed real-time BP estimation system. This study provides an efficient and accurate solution for personalized BP estimation, exhibiting broad potential applications.