Non-invasive System for Mechanical Arterial Pulse Wave Measurements

A non-invasive multichannel measurement system for arterial pulse wave (PW) recording is presented. The system uses sensors made of EMFi (ElectroMechanical Film) material for measuring mechanical PW signals simultaneously from various arterial sites all over the body. In addition to mechanical PW, also electrocardiographic, respiration and photoplethysmographic signals can be recorded with the system. By extracting parameters from the PW contour, valuable information on the subject’s vascular health can be obtained.

The data is collected by a wireless body sensor network which enables the measurement of physiological signals synchronously from eight sensor nodes in maximum. In this study, the pulse waves measured from different locations and postures are illustrated and compared as well as correlations between pulse transition times (PTT) are calculated. The result show that the PTTs obtained from the corresponding arterial sites of the left and right arm correlate strongly in most cases. We also investigated the effects of supporting bias force of EMFi sensors, and our results indicate a strong dependence between the PW amplitude and the supporting bias force.