Current evidence suggests that estimating blood pressure from convenient ECG waveforms alone is not viable

Abstract

Cuffless blood pressure (BP) measurement could improve hypertension awareness and control and is being widely pursued. Some have proposed to estimate BP from the electrocardiogram (ECG) alone despite little physiological basis. In this minireview, we extracted the most relevant articles related to ECG-based BP estimation. Our findings suggest that, as expected, estimating BP from ECG does not appear to be viable. Most notably, we have not found any evidence that ECG features can track BP changes. At best, certain ECG features may indicate heart disease and thus correlate with high BP, but this may not be clinically useful.

Keywords: Cuffless blood pressure; Electrocardiography; Feature extraction; Hypertension; Minireview.