Artery Stiffness Based On Radial Pulse Wave Information

Cardiovascular disease is the primary cause of mortality and a frequent contributor to morbidity throughout the world. Previous studies have shown that arterial stiffness is an inevitable process that occurs during aging and strongly associated with CV risk factors. Therefore, testing arterial stiffness with non-invasive techniques offers an opportunity to evaluate cardiovascular risk assessment for asymptomatic people in research and clinical laboratories.Analysis on wrist pulse signal is a low cost non-invasive method of obtaining physiological and pathological information of people which is portable and could be widely used in the family to monitor the physiological status. It can be characterized by characteristic parameters of the arteries situation and can be detected for predicting the early change of vascular conditions.The purpose of the paper included as follows:First, the paper introduced the radial artery pulse signal acquisition platform, outlined the overall system hardware architecture and software modules. By using PVDF-based sensors, the pulse signal can be achieved continuously.Second, according to different noise characteristics which existed in pulse wave signal acquisition process, we use mathematical morphology approach to eliminate the baseline drift of the pulse signal and use wavelet transform to eliminate noise.Third, we analyze the radial artery pulse wave based on time-domain and frequency domain and wavelet domain characteristics. Wavelet transform is used for signal feature extraction.Fourth, corresponding to the feature selection of physiological information we obtained a higher classification, and the characteristics of pulse waveforms at different age groups were summarized.Last, a novel parameter from time domain analysis is proposed to assess atherosclerosis.