Unobtrusive sensing and wearable devices for health informatics.

The aging population, prevalence of chronic diseases, and outbreaks of infectious diseases are some of the major challenges of our present-day society. To address these unmet healthcare needs, especially for the early prediction and treatment of major diseases, health informatics, which deals with the acquisition, transmission, processing, storage, retrieval, and use of health information, has emerged as an active area of interdisciplinary research. In particular, acquisition of health-related information by unobtrusive sensing and wearable technologies is considered as a cornerstone in health informatics.

Evaluation scale to assess the accuracy of cuff-less blood pressure measuring devices.

Objective: The call for early detection of hypertension and cardiac events creates a heavy demand for devices that can be used for blood pressure (BP) monitoring at home and in ambulatory settings. An emerging type of BP monitors without an occluding cuff has drawn great attentions for this application because it is comfortable and capable of providing continuous readings. For the development the cuff-less devices, it is crucial for the clinicians and engineers to joint efforts in establishing an evaluation standard.

An evaluation of the cuffless blood pressure estimation based on pulse transit time technique: a half year study on normotensive subjects.

In the present study, we investigated the relationship between blood pressure (BP) and pulse transit time (PTT) and evaluated the accuracy of the PTT-based cuffless BP estimation on 14 normotensive subjects. Least-squares regression was used to estimate BP in the first test and a repeatability test carried out half year later. BP in the repeatability test was also estimated using the regression coefficients in the first test.