Blood Pressure Prediction via Recurrent Models with Contextual Layer

Abstract

Recently, the percentage of people with hypertension is increasing, and this phenomenon is widely concerned. At the same time, wireless home Blood Pressure (BP) monitors become accessible in people's life. Since machine learning methods have made important contributions in different fields, many researchers have tried to employ them in dealing with medical problems. However, the existing studies for BP prediction are all based on clinical data with short time ranges. Besides, there do not exist works which can jointly make use of historical measurement data (e.g. BP and heart rate) and contextual data (e.g. age, gender, BMI and altitude). Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), especially those using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units, can capture long range dependencies, so they are effective in modeling variable-length sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel model named recurrent models with contextual layer, which can model the sequential measurement data and contextual data simultaneously to predict the trend of users' BP. We conduct our experiments on the BP data set collected from a type of wireless home BP monitors, and experimental results show that the proposed models outperform several competitive compared methods.