TRCCBP: Transformer Network for Radar-Based Contactless Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring

Abstract

Contactless continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring is of great significance for daily healthcare. Radar-based continuous monitoring methods typically extract time-domain features manually such as pulse transit time (PTT) to calculate the BP. However, breathing and slight body movements usually distort the features extracted from pulse-wave signals, especially in long-term continuous monitoring, and manually extracted features may have limited performance for BP estimation. This article proposes a Transformer network for Radar-based Contactless Continuous Blood Pressure monitoring (TRCCBP). A heartbeat signal-guided single-beat pulse wave extraction method is designed to obtain pure pulse-wave signals. A transformer network-based blood pressure estimation network is proposed to estimate BP, which utilizes convolutional layers with different scales, a gated recurrent unit (GRU) to capture time-dependence in continuous radar signal and multi-head attention modules to capture deep temporal domain characteristics. A radar signal dataset captured in an indoor environment containing 31 persons and a real medical situation containing five persons is set up to evaluate the performance of TRCCBP. Compared with the state-of-the-art method, the average accuracy of diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and systolic blood pressure (SBP) is 4.49 mmHg and 4.73 mmHg, improved by 12.36 mmHg and 8.80 mmHg, respectively. The proposed TRCCBP source codes and radar signal dataset have been made open-source online for further research.

Keywords

• contactless continuous monitoring
• blood pressure
• IR-UWB radar
• pulse wave
• transformer