Digital envelope detector for blood pressure measurement using an oscillometric method

Abstract

Blood pressure measurement in the finger artery offers some advantages compared with that in the brachial artery. However, volume oscillometric signals obtained from finger artery measurement are often influenced by motion artefact due to respiration, speaking, involuntary or voluntary movement, etc. In this paper, we developed a digital envelope detector to detect the maximum oscillation criterion in blood pressure measurement for the first time. The digital envelope detector is robust to noise signals generated by motion artefact and filters out the carrier frequency efficiently. To verify the feasibility of our method, we measured blood pressure for eight subjects using our developed system. The results were compared with the auscultation method. In the case of using a digital envelope detector, we could reduce the mean difference error and standard deviation by 30-40%. Our proposed digital envelope detector is a useful tool to improve the accuracy of blood pressure measurement in finger artery.