BPatch: Continuous Wearable Blood Pressure Monitor

Innovative Wearable Blood Pressure Monitor using dry electrode patch

The development of a wearable blood pressure monitor using a dry electrode patch for long term monitoring marks a significant advancement in the management of cardiovascular health. Unlike traditional single-point measurements, this innovative solution provides continuous monitoring of blood pressure, offering valuable insights into fluctuations caused by daily activities, stress, and natural circadian rhythms. With its potential to revolutionise hypertension management and prevent life-threatening conditions such as strokes and heart attacks, this wearable technology delivers an accessible and practical approach to improving health outcomes and reducing medical costs.

Transforming Hypertension Management and Cardiovascular Health

Blood pressure is one of the most important vital values that can be measured. High blood pressure leads to conditions that are among the top 10 diseases with the most years of life lost. Think of strokes, heart attacks and heart failure.

Currently, blood pressure is mostly measured by a separate, single measurement. However, blood pressure fluctuates due to exercise, stress or the natural circadian day/night rhythm. A snapshot therefore provides a very poor representation of the actual course of a patient’s blood pressure. With more than 1.4 million people in the Netherlands with hypertension, €6.5 billion in blood pressure-related medical costs annually, and 17.9 million deaths worldwide annually that can be related to cardiovascular disorders, there is great demand for a technology that can perform a continuous blood pressure measurement cheaply and easily.

When a continuous measurement is possible, insight is obtained into the blood pressure pattern, which provides much more insight than the blood pressure at one time of the day. A disturbance of the blood pressure pattern can be used as an indicator of the development of various diseases and disorders, can be used to act preventively and to improve the treatment of disorders.

Wearable Blood Pressure Monitor for Continuous Tracking

The BPatch project is actively advancing the development of a wearable blood pressure monitoring patch for continuous tracking that enables non-invasive measurements over extended periods (up to 14 days). We realised (end 2024) a dry electrode patch that is attached to a 2 channel BioZ recorder that does a time synchronised sampling at high sample rates. This is the perfect starting point for advanced data collection and providing continuous insights into local PTT, qualitative features, which will be turned into blood pressure values.

Recent Updates: Fully Functional Data Collection Prototype

We’ve achieved a significant milestone in the project: a stable measurement setup capable of local PTT (Pulse Transit Time) monitoring and the detailed sampling of the BioZ waveforms for further data analysis. This breakthrough is key for our next steps in continuous blood pressure tracking.

Dry electrode patches and option for gel electrodes
Sampling Rates: The system supports high-resolution sampling rates of 1.6 kSps (kilosamples per second) and 860 Sps.
Data Quality: Both gel and dry electrode patches deliver consistent and high-quality data, with PTT values falling within expected ranges for healthy individuals
- Gel-electrode: 3.9–11.6 ms
- Dry-electrode: 3.1–9.4 ms (measurement points closer together)

Next Steps in our Development

While our wearable blood pressure monitor setup now demonstrates reliable data acquisition, further efforts are underway to refine algorithms for PTT calculation and focus on adding qualitative feature extraction from the BioZ waveform. This will be combined with extensive testing with more subjects and for longer periods. Ongoing pilot studies with 1–2 subjects are providing valuable insights, and larger-scale testing is planned to validate the system further.

Additionally, controlled experiments using grip tests are aligning with literature, confirming the patch’s ability to detect blood pressure changes effectively.