Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 598196, 13 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/598196
Research Article
Mobile Personal Health System for Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring
1Department of Computer Engineering, Polytechnic University of Sinaloa, 82199 Mazatlan, SIN, Mexico
2Department of Computer Science, National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, 72840 Puebla, PUE, Mexico
3Computer Engineering, Technological Institute of Morelia, 58120 Morelia, MICH, Mexico
4Institute for Biological Research and Cardiovascular Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zulia, Maracaibo 4002, Venezuela
5Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology and the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA
Received 10 November 2012; Accepted 12 April 2013
Academic Editor: Angel García-Crespo
Copyright © 2013 Luis J. Mena et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
The ARVmobile v1.0 is a multiplatform mobile personal health monitor (PHM) application for ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) monitoring that has the potential to aid in the acquisition and analysis of detailed profile of ABP and heart rate (HR), improve the early detection and intervention of hypertension, and detect potential abnormal BP and HR levels for timely medical feedback. The PHM system consisted of ABP sensor to detect BP and HR signals and smartphone as receiver to collect the transmitted digital data and process them to provide immediate personalized information to the user. Android and Blackberry platforms were developed to detect and alert of potential abnormal values, offer friendly graphical user interface for elderly people, and provide feedback to professional healthcare providers via e-mail. ABP data were obtained from twenty-one healthy individuals (>51 years) to test the utility of the PHM application. The ARVmobile v1.0 was able to reliably receive and process the ABP readings from the volunteers. The preliminary results demonstrate that the ARVmobile 1.0 application could be used to perform a detailed profile of ABP and HR in an ordinary daily life environment, bedsides of estimating potential diagnostic thresholds of abnormal BP variability measured as average real variability.