An iPhone Application for Blood Pressure Monitoring via the Oscillometric Finger Pressing Method

We developed an iPhone X application to measure blood pressure (BP) via the “oscillometric finger pressing method”. The user presses her fingertip on both the front camera and screen to increase the external pressure of the underlying artery, while the application measures the resulting variable-amplitude blood volume oscillations via the camera and applied pressure via the strain gauge array under the screen. The application also visually guides the fingertip placement and actuation and then computes BP from the measurements just like many automatic cuff devices. We tested the application, along with a finger cuff device, against a standard cuff device. The application yielded bias and precision errors of −4.0 and 11.4 mmHg for systolic BP and −9.4 and 9.7 mmHg for diastolic BP (n = 18). These errors were near the finger cuff device errors. This proof-of-concept study surprisingly indicates that cuff-less and calibration-free BP monitoring may be feasible with many existing and forthcoming smartphones.