The Development of a Cuff for the Accuracy Enhancement of the Sphygmomanometer

The purpose of this study is to develop a new cuff to improve the accuracy of blood pressure measurement, and to evaluate the performance of the developed system. We added a small bladder to the normal cuff, which we refer to as the double bladder system. The system that we developed for blood pressure measurement was based on the oscillometric method using a double bladder. This system was developed in order to reduce the oscillation noise and to amplify the signal of pure blood pressure. An oscillometric signal database based on the developed system was evaluated according to the ANSI/AAMI/SP10-1992 standard. The correlation coefficients between the cuff of the double bladder and the normal cuff were 0.98 for systolic pressure and 0.94 for diastolic pressure. The mean differences and the standard deviations between the average blood pressure obtained from a mercury manometer and that obtained from an automated sphygmomanometer were -0.7mmHg and 4.9mmHg for systolic, and -1.4mmHg and 5.4mmHg for diastolic pressure. We conclude that the proposed double bladder-based cuff system improves the accuracy of oscillometric blood pressure measurement. The developed system reduces the range of error by about $44{\sim}62%$ for systolic pressure and about $6{\sim}21%$ for diastolic pressure compared to the most recently developed, commercially available sphygmomanometers.