Seismo: Blood Pressure Monitoring using Built-in Smartphone Accelerometer and Camera

Although cost-effective at-home blood pressure monitors are available, a complementary mobile solution can ease the burden of measuring BP at critical points throughout the day. In this work, we developed and evaluated a smartphone-based BP monitoring application called Seismo. The technique relies on measuring the time between the opening of the aortic valve and the pulse later reaching a periphery arterial site. It uses the smartphone's accelerometer to measure the vibration caused by the heart valve movements and the smartphone's camera to measure the pulse at the fingertip. The system was evaluated in a nine participant longitudinal BP perturbation study. Each participant participated in four sessions that involved stationary biking at multiple intensities. The Pearson correlation coefficient of the blood pressure estimation across participants is 0.20-0.77 (mu=0.55, sigma=0.19), with an RMSE of 3.3-9.2 mmHg (mu=5.2, sigma=2.0).