mmBP: Contact-free Millimetre-wave Radar based Approach to Blood Pressure Measurement

Blood pressure (BP) measurement is an indispensable tool in diagnosing and treating many diseases such as cardiovascular failure and stroke. Traditional direct measurement can be invasive, and wearable-based methods may have limitations of discomfort and inconvenience. Contact-free BP measurement has been recently advocated as a promising alternative. In particular, Millimetre-wave (mmWave) sensing has demonstrated its promising potential, however it is confronted with several challenges including noise and vulnerability to human's tiny motions which may occur intentionally and inevitably. In this paper, we propose mmBP, a contact-free mmWave-based BP measurement system with high accuracy and motion robustness. Due to the high frequency and short wavelength, mmWave signals received in the time domain are dramatically susceptible to ambient noise, and deteriorating signal quality. To reduce noise, we propose a novel delay-Doppler domain feature transformation method to exploit mmWave signal's characteristics and features in the delay-Doppler domain to significantly improve signal quality for pulse waveform construction. We also propose a temporal referential functional link adaptive filter leveraging on the periodic and correlation characteristics of pulse waveform signals to alleviate the impact of human's tiny motions. Extensive experiment results achieved by the leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) method demonstrate that mmBP achieves the mean errors of 0.87mmHg and 1.55mmHg for systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP), respectively; and the standard deviation errors of 5.01mmHg and 5.27mmHg for SBP and DBP, respectively.