Hardware and software co-design for detecting hypertension from photoplethysmogram

Hypertension is one of the leading causes of cardiovascular disease morbidity in the world. If remains untreated, it may cause severe damage like heart attack or even death. Early detection is required to prevent the development of other cardiac abnormalities. Photoplethysmogram (PPG) is a bio signal that can be obtained optically by a sensor. It is studied to monitor the change of volume of blood and detect heart conditions. Previous studies have already applied PPG to detect hypertension at the software level. In this article, along with software-based detection, we have implemented a digital hardware-based system for detecting hypertension from signals recorded using PPG sensor. Xilinx ZedBoard Zynq-7000 field programmable gate array (FPGA) board is utilized for designing the embedded system. The hypertension detection accuracy is 98.02% at the software level while for the digital system, it is 96.05% consuming 0.374 W power. The study can be analyzed for other cardiac disease detection and medical equipment development.