BpBLS: A Knowledge-Embedded Bi-Incremental Broad Learning System for Wearable Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation

Cuffless blood pressure (BP) measurement has gained increasing attention due to the global aging population. Data-driven approaches have shown high accuracy for cuffless BP estimation. However, when deployed on wearable devices, they often suffer from being time-consuming because a complete retraining process is required if the training samples or structure need to be expanded. To address these issues, we propose a Knowledge-embedded Bi-incremental Broad Learning System (BpBLS) for cuffless BP estimation using biosignals collected from wearable devices. With a flat structure, BpBLS can be updated flexibly and quickly without retraining the entire model for incremental biosignals and/or training samples. In BpBLS, a novel Pulse Pressure Regularization (PPR) method is proposed to comprehensively capture the BP knowledge, which is then embedded into the system to enhance its accuracy. Two large-scale wearable BP datasets, the CAS-BP dataset and the Aurora-BP dataset, are utilized to validate the proposed BpBLS. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BpBLS exhibits superior performance in both estimation accuracy and computational efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. For the CAS-BP dataset, the estimation error is 0.60 ± 8.44 for systolic BP (SBP) and 0.29 ± 6.45 for diastolic BP (DBP); while for the Aurora-BP dataset, the estimation error is -0.32 ± 8.46 mmHg for SBP and 0.05 ± 6.65 mmHg for DBP. More importantly, the training time for both datasets is less than ten seconds, and the computational efficiency is improved by an order of magnitude compared to traditional machine learning methods. Our work will serve as a novel flexible and lightweight framework for cuffless BP measurement. Our code is available at https://github.com/Huangzx1023/BpBLS-for-BP-Estimation.