Electronic cardioarteriograph

An easy-to-use affordable device to measure several cardiovascular parameters from unsupervised measurements easily obtained at hands, feet or both. Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death yet plenty of patients remain undiagnosed until acute stages of the disease, or need periodic monitoring after intervention. Existing devices need skilled users, measure a limited number of parameters, often with time-consuming, cumbersome procedures. There is a need for comfortable, easy-to-use, connected devices intended for personal periodic health monitoring that do not disrupt daily routines and can be used anywhere. Hands and feet are very convenient interfaces for cardiovascular measurements and are often used to obtain the heart rate and the ECG by establishing a contact with a conductive electrode on each hand and feet. We add the electronic measurement of arterial blood pulses detected by the changes in the electrical impedance measured between both hands or between the feed through the so-called impedance plethysmogram (IPG). We have designed a device able to simultaneously obtain the ECG and a proximal and two distal IPGs by using only four conductive contacts, which can be for example two contacts with two different fingers of each hand, two contacts with fingers in one hand and two contacts with two points on the opposite wrist, two contacts with each arm or wrist, or two contacts with each foot or leg. Time intervals between different features of the ECG and the IPGs yield several Pulse Arrival Times (PAT), which can be used to measure systolic time intervals (STI) that inform about cardiac contractility and valvular diseases, and Pulse Transit Times (PTT), which inform about central and peripheral arterial stiffness, related to factors such as ageing, hypertension, and risk of cardiovascular events, and the autonomous nervous system.