Clinical Validation of Wearable Piezoelectric Blood Pressure Sensor for Continuous Health Monitoring.

Wearable blood pressure sensors have recently attracted attention as healthcare devices for continuous non-invasive arterial pressure (CNAP) monitoring. However, the accuracy of wearable blood pressure (BP) monitoring devices has been controversial due to the low signal quality of sensors, the absence of an accurate transfer function to convert the sensor signals into BP values, and the lack of clinical validation regarding measurement precision. Here, we report a wearable piezoelectric blood pressure sensor (WPBPS), which achieved a high normalized sensitivity (0.062 kPa -1 ), fast response time (23 ms) for CNAP monitoring. The transfer function of a linear regression model was designed, offering a simple solution to convert the flexible piezoelectric sensor signals into BP values. In order to verify the measurement accuracy of WPBPS, clinical trials were performed on 35 subjects aged from 20s to 80s after screening. The mean difference between the WPBPS and a commercial sphygmomanometer of 175 BP data pairs was -0.89 ± 6.19 mmHg and -0.32 ± 5.28 mmHg for systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP), respectively. By building a WPBPS-embedded wristwatch, we demonstrated the potentially promising use of a convenient, portable continuous BP monitoring system for cardiovascular disease diagnosis in this study. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.