hBP-Fi: Contactless Blood Pressure Monitoring via Deep-Analyzed Hemodynamics

Abstract

Blood pressure (BP) measurement is significant to the assessment of many dangerous health conditions. Apart from invasively inserting catheters into arteries, non-invasive approaches typically rely on wearing devices on specific skin areas with consistent pressure. However, this can be uncomfortable and unsuitable for certain individuals, and the accuracy of these methods may significantly decrease due to improper device placements and wearing states. Recently, contactless methods leveraging RF technology have emerged as a potential alternative. However, these methods suffer from the drawback of overfitting deep learning (DL) models without a sound physiological basis, resulting in a lack of clear explanations for their outputs. Consequently, such limitations lead to skepticism and distrust among medical experts. In this paper, we propose hBP-Fi, a contactless BP measurement system driven by hemodynamics acquired via RF sensing. In addition to its contactless convenience, hBP-Fi is superior to other RF sensing approaches in i) grounding on hemodynamics as the key physical process of heart-pulse activities, ii) exploiting beam-steerable RF devices to achieve a super-resolution scan on the fine-grained pulse activities along arm arteries, and iii) ensuring the trustworthiness of system outputs via an explainable (decision-understandable) DL model. Extensive experiments with 35 subjects demonstrate that hBP-Fi can achieve the error of -2.05±6.83 mmHg and 1.99 ± 6.30 mmHg for monitoring systolic and diastolic blood pressures, respectively.