ARTERIAL WALL HARDNESS EVALUATION SYSTEM

摘要

An arterial wall hardness evaluation system comprises a cuff attached to part of a living body, a pressure sensor for detecting the pressure within the cuff, a cuff pressure control section for performing control for increasing/decreasing the pressure within the cuff to a predetermined value according to the value detected by the pressure sensor, and a data processing section for calculating the amplitudes of a cuff pressure pulse wave and a blood pressure pulse wave from a pulse wave detected by the pressure sensor and evaluating the hardness of an arterial wall on the basis of the pulse wave amplitudes. The hardness of the arterial wall is evaluated by estimating a pressure-diameter characteristic curve showing the relationship between the blood vessel diameter and the difference between internal and external pressures applied to the blood vessel wall, and evaluated by estimation from the shape and amplitude of the pulse wave detected by the cuff. The evaluation is performed by estimating a function obtained by differentiating the pressure-diameter characteristic curve with respect to the difference between internal and external pressures from the detected pulse wave and using an arctangent function or a sigmoid function as the function. Thus, everyone can precisely evaluate the blood vessel hardness easily at home without requiring specialized knowledge.