Blood pressure monitor using Atmega32

Description

Abstract:

Our final project is to design and build a portable blood pressure monitor device that can measure a user’s blood pressures and heart rate through an inflatable hand cuff. The device is consisted of three main parts: external hardwares (such as cuff, motor, valve, and lcd), analog circuit, and microcontroller. The anolog circuit converts the pressure value inside the cuff into readable and usable analog waveforms. The MCU samples the waveforms and performs A/D convertion so that further calculations can be made. In addition, the MCU also controls the operation of the devices such as the button and lcd display. Since we have the word ‘portable’ in our title, for sure all of the components are put together in one package which allows a user to take it anywhere and perform a measurement whenever and wherever he/she wants.

It is undeniable that nowadays people are more aware of the health conditions. One of the most widely used methods to test the health conditions of an individual is to measure his/her blood pressures and heart rate. We, as ones of those who are concerned about their health, decided to work on this subject matter because we would like to build something that is useful and useable in real life.

Usually when the doctor measures the patient’s blood pressure, he will pump the air into the cuff and use the stethoscope to listen to the sounds of the blood in the artery of the patient’s arm. At the start, the air is pumped to be above the systolic value. At this point, the doctor will hear nothing through the stethoscope. After the pressure is released gradually, at some point, the doctor will begin to hear the sound of the heart beats. At this point, the pressure in the cuff corresponds to the systolic pressure. After the pressure decreases further, the doctor will continue hearing the sound (with different characteristics). And at some point, the sounds will begin to disappear. At this point, the pressure in the cuff corresponds to the diastolic pressure.

To perform a measurement, we use a method called “oscillometric”. The air will be pumped into the cuff to be around 20 mmHg above average systolic pressure (about 120 mmHg for an average). After that the air will be slowly released from the cuff causing the pressure in the cuff to decrease. As the cuff is slowly deflated, we will be measuring the tiny oscillation in the air pressure of the arm cuff. The systolic pressure will be the pressure at which the pulsation starts to occur. We will use the MCU to detect the point at which this oscillation happens and then record the pressure in the cuff. Then the pressure in the cuff will decrease further. The diastolic pressure will be taken at the point in which the oscillation starts to disappear.

The diagram above shows how our device is operated. The user will use buttons to control the operations of the whole system. The MCU is the main component that controls all the operations such as motor and valve control, A/D conversion, and calculation, until the measurement is completed. The results then are output through and LCD screen for the user to see.

Analog Circuit:

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 health of the user. The pressure transducer produces the output voltage proportional to the applied differential input pressure. The output voltage of the pressure transducer ranges from 0 to 40 mV. But for our application, we want to pump the arm cuff to only 160 mmHg (approximately 21.33 kPa). This corresponds to the output voltage of approximately 18 mV. Thus, we choose to amplify the voltage so that the DC output voltage of DC amplifier has an output range from 0 to 4V. Thus, we need a gain of approximately 200. 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 (it’s just a regular amplifier). The filter is designed to have large gain at around 1-4 Hz and to attenuate any signal that is out of the pass band. The AC component from the band-pass filter is the most important factor to determine when to capture the systolic/diastolic pressures and when to determine the heart rate of the user. The final stage is the AC coupling stage. We use two identical resistors to provide a DC bias level at approximately 2.5 volts. The 47 uF capacitor is used to coupling only AC component of the signal so that we can provide the DC bias level independently.