On line detection of movement artifacts to improve ambulatory blood pressure monitoring

This paper presents a method to detect on line movement artifacts from correct arterial blood pressure pulses, during ambulatory blood pressure measurement. The method is based on the comparison of the pulses to be analyzed with some reference pulses stored in memory. The discriminative function is a Boolean function, composed of different parameters like the correlation coefficient, the difference between the maximal value, the minimal value and the width of the two pulses. The function was tuned so as not to be too selective, to prevent rejection of correct pulses, which would increase the measurement length. The results obtained in validation are interesting since they are much better than those obtained by the current method used in the device. On the same set of data, the sensibility of the detection increases from 71% to 85% and the specificity from 25% to 68%. Additional data are still necessary for a complete validation of the method