Cuffless Photoplethysmography Device for Continuous Monitoring of Blood Pressure

IntroductionAccurate and convenient monitoring of BP is challenging and relies on cuff-based devices or in the postoperative and intensive care settings, on invasive measurements. The aim of this study was to prospectively evaluate the accuracy of BP measurements obtained from a novel, commercially available cuffless, non-invasive photoplethysmography (PPG)-based chest patch monitor compared to the reference standard invasive arterial pressure (IAP) monitoring, in patients after cardiac surgery. MethodsThis single center prospective study enrolled adults who underwent cardiac surgery. The PPG-based data were compared to IAP as part of standard of care. Bland-Altman plots and Pearsons correlations were used to assess the accuracy between the two techniques. ResultsNinety-six patients consented for the study. Mean age was 63.2{+/-}12.2 years (range 24 to 84), and 32 (33%) were women. Average monitoring time was 25.6{+/-}17.2. In total, we evaluated 78659 readings for systolic BP (SBP), 78818 for diastolic BP (DBP), and 92544 for HR analysis. These yielded correlation coefficients of r=0.959, 0.973, 0.966, and 0.962 for SBP, DBP, mean arterial pressure (MAP), and heart rate (HR), respectively. The Bland-Altman analysis showed a bias{+/-}SD of 0.1{+/-}4.8 mmHg for SBP; 0.4{+/-}2.1 mmHg for DBP; 0.26{+/-}2.6 mmHg for MAP, and 0.15{+/-}3.6 beats per minutes for HR. 95% of SBP, and 99.9% of DBP measurements were within 10 mmHg of the reference measurement. ConclusionCuffless device offers a high level of accuracy of BP and HR, supporting the use of this novel noninvasive tool for continuous BP monitoring. Further studies are needed to validate those findings.