Abstract
In this study, a new method using a capacitive sensor and an adaptive filter was proposed to deal with artifacts contaminating an oscillation signal in oscilometric blood pressure measurement. The proposed method makes use of a variation of the capacitance between an electrode fixed to a cuff and an external object to detect artifacts caused by the external object bumping into the cuff. The proposed method utilizes the adaptive filter based on linear prediction to remove the detected artifacts. The conventional method using linear interpolation and the proposed method using the adaptive filter were applied to three types of the artifact-contaminated oscillation signals(no overlap, non-consecutive overlap, and consecutive overlap between artifacts and oscillations) to compare them in terms of the artifact reduction performance. The proposed method was more robust than the conventional method in the case of consecutive overlap between artifacts and oscillations. The proposed method could be useful for measuring blood pressure in such a noisy environment that the subject is being transported.