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Abstract

An electronic method and apparatus for automatically determining systolic and diastolic blood pressure and heart rate by accurately detecting, verifying and evaluating the full stream of korotkoff sounds produced as electrical signals from a microphone in a cuff occluding the brachial artery of a patient. Waveform analysis is first performed upon the incoming signal waveforms by an analog prescreening subsystem to initially separate true korotkoff sound signals from a variety of artifact and noise signals and to provide an output pulse stream correctly indicating korotkoff sound occurrences in the time and blood pressure domain, with each pulse proportional in amplitude to the amplitude of the corresponding korotkoff sound represented. The output korotkoff sound pulse stream is then digitized by an analog to digital converter and further analyzed by a digital processing subsystem to additionally remove any noise and artifact signals passed as otherwise misleading quasi-korotkoff sound pulses by the prescreening subsystem, to modify and certify the resultant data as either reliable or suspect, to determine heart rate and the most probable values for systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels indicated by the signal stream detected during the measurement cycle.

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First Claim