On Employing Nonparametric Bootstrap Technique in Oscillometric Blood Pressure Measurement for Confidence Interval Estimation

Blood pressure (BP) is an important vital signal for determining the health of an individual subject. Although estimation of mean arterial blood pressure is possible using oscillometric blood pressure techniques, there are no established techniques in the literature for obtaining confidence interval (CI) for systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) estimates obtained from such BP measurements. This paper proposes a nonparametric bootstrap technique to obtain CI with a small number of the BP measurements. The proposed algorithm uses pseudo measurements employing nonparametric bootstrap technique to derive the pseudo maximum amplitudes (PMA) and the pseudo envelopes (PE). The SBP and DBP are then derived using the new relationships between PMA and PE and the CIs for such estimates. Application of the proposed method on an experimental dataset of 85 patients with five sets of measurements for each patient has yielded a smaller Cl than the conventional student t-method.