Cardiovascular disease and its complications have become a great threat to human life and health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 17.9 million people die from cardiovascular diseases each year, representing 31% of all global deaths, calling for more effective and timely diagnosis and treatment of the diseases.
Blood pressure measurement is one of the most important indices in diagnosing cardiovascular disease. However, the most commonly used blood pressure cuff that is placed around the bare and stretched out upper arm is inconvenient and lack the ability to facilitate 24 hours continuous self-monitoring.
In order to advance the convenience and continuous measurement of blood pressure, and to diminish the potential risks posed by cardiovascular diseases, a research team led by Professor Feng Xue from Tsinghua’s School of Aerospace Engineering has developed a skin-like integrated optoelectronic system that can be mounted on the human skin for monitoring Continuous Noninvasive Arterial blood Pressure (CNAP) in the clinic, and wirelessly transmit the data to smart terminals in real time, ushering a novel strategy for CNAP measurement and a new route to achieve the long-term dynamic monitoring of blood pressure and blood oxygen.
Integrating the foundation of mechanical research and design experience of flexible electronic devices, Professor Feng Xue’s team established a physical model via principles of virtual work for blood pressure measurement. They also proposed an optical path differential method based on multi-wavelength for suppressing the noise caused by motion artifacts. These works can measure the accurate pulse wave velocity with absolute error of less than 10 mmHg in clinical trials, compared with the invasive measurement.
Their research was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China and National Natural Science Foundation of China and has been recently published in the National Science Review, titled “Wearable skin-like optoelectronic systems with suppression of motion artifact for cuff-less continuous blood pressure monitor”.
Source: School of Aerospace Engineering
