Toward Ubiquitous Blood Pressure Monitoring via Pulse Transit Time: Theory and Practice

Ubiquitous blood pressure (BP) monitoring is needed to improve hypertension detection and control and is becoming feasible due to recent technological advances such as in wearable sensing. Pulse transit time (PTT) represents a well-known, potential approach for ubiquitous BP monitoring. The goal of this review is to facilitate the achievement of reliable, ubiquitous BP monitoring via PTT. We explain the conventional BP measurement methods and their limitations; present models to summarize the theory of the PTT-BP relationship; outline the approach while pinpointing the key challenges; overview the previous work towards putting the theory to practice; make suggestions for best practice and future research; and discuss realistic expectations for the approach.