Design of a Portable Apparatus for Assessing Vascular Stiffness

A non-invasive and portable apparatus is designed for the early detection of vascular stiffness in community use. The device is based on embedded system. It collects electrocardiograph (ECG) and plethysmograph (PPG) signals from human body, calculates characteristic parameters that reflect the state of the blood vessel and displays them on LCD real-time. Also, a network communication module is integrated for transmitting the signals and results to the database in hospitals through Internet. The preliminary results show that pulse wave velocity (PWV) and augmentation index (AI) are closely related to age and systolic blood pressure (SBP), which demonstrates that the developed device has the ability to indicate the vessel stiffness.