SEOUL, South Korea– Sky Labs, a healthcare company aiming to transform the healthcare industry with 24/7 monitoring in daily lives, announced that its report “Continuous cuffless blood pressure monitoring using photoplethysmography-based PPG2BP-net for high intra-subject blood pressure variations” has been published in Nature’s Scientific Reports.
The research focuses on developing deep learning algorithms for big data analytics in blood pressure measurement. This algorithm effectively learns the dynamic changes in PPG features according to blood pressure variations.
Continuous, comfortable, convenient, and accurate blood pressure (BP) measurement and monitoring are crucial for the early diagnosis of various cardiovascular diseases. The cuffless BP measurement algorithm developed by Sky Labs utilized atrial blood pressure data from 4,185 subjects in operation room, whereas other in-house data involves a smaller sample size of fewer than 1,000 subjects. This extensive data enabled the algorithm to learn various PPG patterns and optimize BP measurement technology.
Sky Labs’ approach of separating the subjects into different training, validation, and testing sets improved blood pressure estimation, prevents overfitting and ensures reliable BP results for anyone using it. To improve the accuracy performance of a calibration-based BP estimation model and avoid overqualification, Sky Labs utilized PPG signals acquired from patients in operation room while monitoring atrial blood pressure with significant variations in BP. This innovative technique allows the algorithm to accommodate general users with highly fluctuating blood pressure throughout the day.
Sky Labs’ ring-type medical device “CART-I BP” can measure and monitor blood pressure 24/7 without user intervention when worn on the finger. It broadens the scope of hypertension management by providing accurate measurements for challenging scenarios such as nocturnal hypertension, morning surge, and blood pressure variability. The blood pressure monitoring feature, approved by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (Korean FDA) in March, is expected to be released by the end of 2023.
Jack Lee, the CEO of Sky Labs, said, “CART-I BP has high potential to improve hypertension awareness, treatment, and management, enabling early prediction of cardiovascular events. Hopefully, this research will take us a step closer towards providing improved BP management for the approximately 1.28 billion individuals suffering from hypertension around the world.”
