Automated Hypertension Detection Using ConvMixer and Spectrogram Techniques with Ballistocardiograph Signals

Blood pressure is the pressure exerted by the blood in the veins against the walls of the veins. If this value is above normal levels, it is known as high blood pressure (HBP) or hypertension (HPT). This health problem which often referred to as the "silent killer" reduces the quality of life and causes severe damage to many body parts in various ways. Besides, its mortality rate is very high. Hence, rapid and effective diagnosis of this health problem is crucial. In this study, an automatic diagnosis of HPT has been proposed using ballistocardiography (BCG) signals. The BCG signals were transformed to the time-frequency domain using the spectrogram method. While creating the spectrogram images, parameters such as window type, window length, overlapping rate, and fast Fourier transform size were adjusted. Then, these images were classified using ConvMixer architecture, similar to vision transformers (ViT) and multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-mixer structures, which have attracted a lot of attention. Its performance was compared with classical architectures such as ResNet18 and ResNet50. The results obtained showed that the ConvMixer structure gave very successful results and a very short operation time. Our proposed model has obtained an accuracy of 98.14%, 98.79%, and 97.69% for the ResNet18, ResNet50, and ConvMixer architectures, respectively. In addition, it has been observed that the processing time of the ConvMixer architecture is relatively short compared to these two architectures.