| Blood pressure is vital sign information that physicians often need as preliminary data for immediate intervention during emergency situations or for regular monitoring of people with cardiovascular diseases. Despite the availability of portable blood pressure meters in the market, they are not regularly carried by people, creating a need for an ultra-portable measurement platform or device that can be easily carried and used at all times. One such device is the smartphone which, according to comScore survey is used by 26.2% of the US adult population.;The mass production of these phones with built-in sensors and high computation power has created numerous possibilities for application development in different domains including biomedical. Motivated by this capability and their extensive usage, this thesis focuses on developing a blood pressure measurement platform on smartphones.;Specifically, I developed a blood pressure measurement system on a smart phone using the built-in camera and a customized external microphone. The system consists of first obtaining heart beats using the microphone and finger pulse with the camera, and finally calculating the blood pressure using the recorded data. I developed techniques for finding the best location for obtaining the data, making the system usable by all categories of people. The proposed system resulted in accuracies between 90-100%, when compared to traditional blood pressure meters.;The second part of this thesis presents a new system for remote heart beat monitoring using the smart phone. With the proposed system, heart beats can be transferred live by patients and monitored by physicians remotely for diagnosis. The proposed blood pressure measurement and remote monitoring systems will be able to facilitate information acquisition and decision making by the 9-1-1 operators. |
