Continuous Cardiovascular Monitoring with Pulse-Transit-Time to prevent Intradialytic Hypotension of Dialysis Patients

Dialysis treatment poses the risk of cardiovascular problems. Non-invasive blood pressure measurement based on the Riva-Rocci method (gold standard) is used to detect a drop in blood pressure at an early stage. Frequent non-invasive blood pressure measurements are both disturbing and painful for the patient and thus often rejected. It is suspected that a change in pulse wave velocity or pulse transit time can indicate a change in blood pressure and circulatory function. It is being investigated whether continuous pulse transit time measurements can serve as a trigger for less frequent non-invasive blood pressure measurement. A custom built measurement system is presented and used to measure the pulse transit time during a case study. Our results indicate a potential use case for the pulse transit time as a trigger for cuff based blood pressure measurements.