SBIR Phase I: Enabling Cuffless Blood Pressure Monitoring with a Novel, Wearable RF-Based Sensor.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to achieve non-contact continuous blood pressure monitoring and address a critical need for personalized medicine for hypertension. For the first time, hypertensive individuals will have access to a comfortable, non-contact, continuous blood pressure monitoring device that allows for seamless blood pressure measurement without disturbing the user in any way. With 1 out of every 3 adults in the United States living with hypertension, The proposed innovation will meet an important need to monitor blood pressure continuously and noninvasively, thereby providing new insight into how one's blood pressure responds to medication, exercise, diet, and their actions. Longer term, the data collected by the team will yield unprecedented insight into short and long-term blood pressure rhythms and has the potential to revolutionize personalized medicine for hypertension. This technology is expected to empower people with the feedback that they need to understand what works for them as an individual to maintain their health. The proposed project will lay the ground work for the development of a continuous-wear blood pressure monitoring device suitable for everyday use. Through an RF sensor that can detect arterial movement, the proposed technology can measure cardiovascular parameters for every heartbeat. To date, a prototype sensor has shown significant promise at providing accurate blood pressure measurements in a small sample. Beyond blood pressure information, the fundamental capability of the proposed technology is to measure arterial stiffness, a critical indicator of cardiovascular health. With the support of this NSF grant, the team is expected to develop its technology and ready it for commercialization. The goal for this project is to: (1) eliminate first-surface reflections and micro-motion artifacts related to RF sensing; (2) refine blood pressure algorithms and compare measurements against gold standard BP measurements in healthy, hypotensive, and hypertensive populations. The proposed technology could become an important scientific tool to aid the advancement of cardiovascular research, enabling researchers and clinicians alike to gain further understanding of cardiovascular-related health parameter.