Transforming Cardiovascular Health: a Transformer-Based Approach to Continuous, Non-Invasive Blood Pressure Estimation via Radar Sensing

Hypertension is considered to be one of the most critical risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. As such, continuous, accurate and non-invasive monitoring of blood pressure (BP) is of utmost importance and research on such approaches is gaining momentum. In this study, we propose a novel transformer-based model architecture that leverages historic pressure wave information for accurate blood pressure regression. We achieve remarkable results that satisfy both the British Hypertension Society (BHS) and the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) blood pressure monitoring standards, with 97% of errors less than 5mmHg and 1.02 ± 1.77mmHg (mean absolute error ± standard deviation) accuracy for systolic (SBP), and 93% and 1.57 ± 2.36mmHg for diastolic BP (DBP). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that utilizes transformers for BP regression and the first radar approach to satisfy BP standards, demonstrating the predictive power of the proposed model and the suitability of radar for the task.