Statistical and fuzzy models of ambulatory systolic blood pressure for hypertension diagnosis

A solution to reduce Ambulatory Systolic Blood Pressure (ASBP) variability during the analysis of a 24 hours profile is on study and presented in this article. It consists in equipping the portable ASBP recorder device with other sensors, a three axes accelerometer and a heart rate recorder, so as to enable an analysis of the tensional profile in the light of these concomitant data. A data base has been collected and two models linking ASBP variations with corporal acceleration and heart rate measurements are developed: a regression one, based on a priori knowledge of ASBP variations, and a fuzzy one, automatically built from experimental data. Their performances are tested in prediction and compared. Then, the results are compared to those obtained with one of the solutions currently used by the physicians to deal with ASBP variability. The results obtained on the 16 young subjects from the data base are significantly improved and thus, encouraging.