Arterial stiffness estimation based on the digital volume pulse for utilization in home health management environments

This paper is concerned with a new approach for the estimation of arterial stiffness from the digital volume pulse (DVP). From the previous studies, it is well-known that arterial stiffness is a reasonable indicator of cardiovascular events and thus can be used as a prognostic factor of cardiovascular diseases. To evaluate arterial stiffness, various diagnostic techniques, such as the pulse wave velocity (PWV), have been proposed and applied. Although these techniques show high performance in assessment, they have poor usability partly due to the restriction on the test place. In order to cope with this problem, we propose the DVP-based arterial stiffness estimation, which can be utilized in home health management systems. Firstly, we extract pulse features that are predictive factors of arterial stiffness. After that, we perform a multiple linear regression analysis to obtain the prediction equation of arterial stiffness. By using the equation, we can estimate arterial stiffness with the digital volume pulse. From the experiments, we can insist that our proposed approach can be used as a noninvasive estimator of arterial stiffness in home health management environments.