Comparison of proximal and distal BCG measurements for blood pressure estimation

Abstract This paper presents a comparison of the blood pressure estimation based on Ballistocardiography (BCG) measurements, acquired at two different body locations. The first BCG signal being the proximally measured BCG at the carotid artery, the second being the distally measured BCG at the foot. Parallel to the BCG measurement, the reference blood pressure is measured. Visual inspection of both BCG signals shows a decreased signal quality for the distal measurement. Moreover, in order to estimate the blood pressure based on BCG derived features for beat-to-beat intervals two neural networks are deployed. It is shown that Mean Absolut Error (MAE) is twice as large for the distal blood pressure estimation as for the proximal estimation and that the estimated pressure values of the proximal model show less variation when comparing the reference pressure and estimated pressure visually.