Non-invasive blood pressure measurement based on the electronic palpation method

The most commonly used methods of non-invasive blood pressure monitoring are the auscultation method and the oscillometric method. Although both methods are generally accepted and widely used, they are reportedly inaccurate and irreproducible in terms of specific hypertension screening and control. In this paper we present a new electronic palpation method based on an arm cuff and a wrist watch type pulse sensor, which we have developed and tested. The results show that this method is more accurate than the auscultation and oscillometric methods. The difference relative to an intra-arterial measurement was -0.8+/-4.6 mmHg for systolic values and -1.5+/-5.0 mmHg for diastolic values. Moreover, the correlation coefficient of 0.81 was higher than the corresponding figures for the auscultation and oscillometric methods: 0.60 and 0.55, respectively.