Noninvasive Continuous Blood Pressure Measurement and GPS Position Monitoring of Patients

Need of blood pressure measurement is usable in wide spectrum of applications from physicians offices to home care applications. Many types of blood pressure measurement devices can be bought in electronics shops. All such devices are measurement devices which need to be in contact with human body (hand or foot mainly). Further they allow only one measurement per several minutes interval (typically 10 minutes). Our goal is to develop a small device for noninvasive continuous measurement of blood pressure. This device must be a small battery powered embedded system which measures a blood pressure during a long time period and sends this information to remote operator's stations. In this station the analysis of receiving video data is made for several types of usage. In current state we develop a small device to scan a video or a set of images with the NIR (Near Infra Red) CCD camera. The video data are transferred by wireless connection to the computer where they are analyzed. The first results provide an indication to be a right way to obtain exact continuous blood pressure information. In the future there exists a way to integrate this blood pressure measurement system to concurrently developed biotelemetric system architecture for patients and physicians called Guardian. For position monitoring in outdoor areas there is developed GPS module which informs about patient location and brings very precise time basis for other measuring modules of Guardian system and time synchronization.