Discussion of Cuffless Blood Pressure Prediction Using Plethysmograph Based on a Longitudinal Experiment: Is the Individual Model Necessary?

Using the Plethysmograph (PPG) signal to estimate blood pressure (BP) is attractive given the convenience and possibility of continuous measurement. However, due to the personal differences and the insufficiency of data, the dilemma between the accuracy for a small dataset and the robustness as a general method remains. To this end, we scrutinized the whole pipeline from the feature selection to regression model construction based on a one-month experiment with 11 subjects. By constructing the explanatory features consisting of five general PPG waveform features that do not require the identification of dicrotic notch and diastolic peak and the heart rate, three regression models, which are partial least square, local weighted partial least square, and Gaussian Process model, were built to reflect the underlying assumption about the nature of the fitting problem. By comparing the regression models, it can be confirmed that an individual Gaussian Process model attains the best results with 5.1 mmHg and 4.6 mmHg mean absolute error for SBP and DBP and 6.2 mmHg and 5.4 mmHg standard deviation for SBP and DBP. Moreover, the results of the individual models are significantly better than the generalized model built with the data of all subjects.

Automated summary

This study proposes a method for estimating blood pressure using PPG signal and evaluates its accuracy and robustness through the comparison of different regression models. The results show that an individual Gaussian Process model achieves the best performance, outperforming the generalized model built with all subjects' data.