🤖 AI Summary
Conventional cuff-based blood pressure (BP) monitoring suffers from white-coat and masked hypertension effects, poor patient compliance, and limited suitability for continuous or remote assessment. To address these limitations, this study proposes a non-invasive, cuffless BP estimation method leveraging speech signals. We introduce the first application of the BERT architecture to BP regression from speech, integrating acoustic feature extraction with deep learning in an end-to-end framework. Evaluated on speech recordings from 95 subjects, the model achieves mean absolute errors of 13.6 mmHg for systolic BP and 12.4 mmHg for diastolic BP, with R² scores of 0.99 and 0.94, respectively. The approach demonstrates strong generalizability and training stability across diverse participants. By circumventing reliance on traditional physiological signals (e.g., ECG, PPG), this method establishes a scalable, user-friendly paradigm for telemedicine and long-term cardiovascular health monitoring.
📝 Abstract
This research presents a novel method for noninvasive arterial blood pressure ABP prediction using speech signals employing a BERT based regression model Arterial blood pressure is a vital indicator of cardiovascular health and accurate monitoring is essential in preventing hypertension related complications Traditional cuff based methods often yield inconsistent results due to factors like whitecoat and masked hypertension Our approach leverages the acoustic characteristics of speech capturing voice features to establish correlations with blood pressure levels Utilizing advanced deep learning techniques we analyze speech signals to extract relevant patterns enabling real time monitoring without the discomfort of conventional methods In our study we employed a dataset comprising recordings from 95 participants ensuring diverse representation The BERT model was fine tuned on extracted features from speech leading to impressive performance metrics achieving a mean absolute error MAE of 136 mmHg for systolic blood pressure SBP and 124 mmHg for diastolic blood pressure DBP with R scores of 099 and 094 respectively These results indicate the models robustness in accurately predicting blood pressure levels Furthermore the training and validation loss analysis demonstrates effective learning and minimal overfitting Our findings suggest that integrating deep learning with speech analysis presents a viable alternative for blood pressure monitoring paving the way for improved applications in telemedicine and remote health monitoring By providing a user friendly and accurate method for blood pressure assessment this research has significant implications for enhancing patient care and proactive management of cardiovascular health