From Elastic to Viscoelastic: An EEMD-Enhanced Pulse Transit Time Model for Robust Blood Pressure Estimation
It addresses the limitation of conventional elastic models for continuous BP monitoring during rapid hemodynamic changes, offering a more robust method for cuffless BP estimation.
The paper proposes a physics-informed framework that incorporates viscoelastic compensation via EEMD to improve cuffless blood pressure estimation from pulse transit time, achieving RMSE of 5.22 mmHg for systolic and 3.65 mmHg for diastolic BP on a challenging MIMIC-II subset.
Cuffless blood pressure (BP) estimation based on Pulse Transit Time (PTT) has emerged as a promising solution for continuous health monitoring. However, conventional models relying on the Moens-Korteweg equation often fail during rapid hemodynamic fluctuations, as they assume arterial walls are purely elastic and neglect inherent viscoelasticity. To address this limitation, we propose a physics-informed framework introducing a viscoelastic compensation mechanism. First, raw photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals undergo high-fidelity reconstruction using Modified Akima (Makima) interpolation. Second, a robust Intersecting Tangent Method is applied for precise pulse foot localization. Crucially, we utilize Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) to isolate high-frequency Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs), defining a ``Viscoelastic Velocity Metric'' to quantify the vascular damping effect ($η\cdot \dotε$) typically ignored by elastic models. The framework was rigorously validated on a challenging subset of the MIMIC-II database (364 subjects, 28,525 cardiac cycles) characterized by a high prevalence of hypertension (23.4\%). Experimental results demonstrate medical-grade accuracy, yielding a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 5.22 mmHg for Systolic and 3.65 mmHg for Diastolic BP, with Pearson correlation coefficients ($R > 0.97$). These findings confirm that incorporating viscoelastic features significantly enhances robustness against vascular hysteresis.