Virtual auscultatory non-invasive blood pressure monitor

The majority of nowadays home-use, GP and clinical practice non-invasive blood pressure (NIBP) measurement devices use the oscillometric principle of measurement. Being simple, accurate, low-cost and reliable, oscillometry indeed has also a few weak-points - the measuring error can be substantially increased when measuring geriatric population, large measurement errors with patients with arrhythmias, errors due to moving artifacts etc. The auscultatory method for blood pressure measurements, otherwise due to the higher costs and technical weaknesses not so often used in practice, is more robust in those cases. This paper describes an attempt of designing and building a virtual auscultatory automatic measuring device. A semi-automatic device (the occurrence of the systolic and diastolic blood pressure still has to be determined manually) was built and compared to a commercial oscillometric device by measuring healthy volunteers.