Design Considerations:

Blood pressure monitors can use Korotkoff, Oscillometry, or Pulse Transit Time methods to measure blood pressure. They employ a pressure cuff, pump, and transducer to measure the blood pressure and heart rate in three phases: Inflation, Measurement, and Deflation. They include an LCD, memory recall, selection buttons, power management, and USB interface.

The pressure transducer produces the output voltage proportional to the applied differential input pressure. The output voltages of the pressure transducer range from 0 to 40 mV, which needs to be amplified so that the output voltage of the DC amplifier has a range from 0 to 5V. This is why, we need a high-gain amplifier. Then the signal from the DC amplifier will be passed on to the band-pass filter. The DC amplifier amplifies both DC and AC component of the signal.

The filter is designed to have large gain at around 1-4 Hz and attenuate any signal that is out of the pass band. The AC component from filter is important for determining when to capture the systolic/diastolic pressures and heart rate of the patient. The final stage of the front end is an AC coupling stage, after which the signal is sent to analog to digital converters, and digitized.

The digital measurements of pressure and heart rate are performed by the microprocessor. Measurements results are stored in EEPROM or FLASH memory as a data log that can be uploaded to a PC via USB. The analog circuit is used to amplify both the DC and AC components of the output signal of pressure transducer so that we can use the MCU to process the signal and obtain useful information about the patient’s health.

Block Diagram:

Source: Texas Instruments

Download Useful Technical Documents:

EEPROM Emulation With the TMS320F28xxx DSCs

A Single-Chip Pulsoximeter Design Using the MSP430