PP-Net: A Deep Learning Framework for PPG-Based Blood Pressure and Heart Rate Estimation

This paper presents a deep learning model 'PP-Net' which is the first of its kind, having the capability to estimate the physiological parameters: Diastolic blood pressure (DBP), Systolic blood pressure (SBP), and Heart rate (HR) simultaneously from the same network using a single channel PPG signal. The proposed model is designed by exploiting the deep learning framework of Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network (LRCN), exhibiting inherent ability of feature extraction, thereby, eliminating the cost effective steps of feature selection and extraction, making less-complex for deployment on resource constrained platforms such as mobile platforms. The performance demonstration of the PP-Net is done on a larger and publically available MIMIC-II database. We achieved an average NMAE of 0.09 (DBP) and 0.04 (SBP) mmHg for BP, and 0.046 bpm for HR estimation on total population of 1557 critically ill subjects. The accurate estimation of HR and BP on a larger population compared to the existing methods, demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed deep learning framework. The accurate evaluation on a huge population with CVD complications, validates the robustness of the proposed framework in pervasive healthcare monitoring especially cardiac and stroke rehabilitation monitoring.