Force plate monitoring of human hemodynamics

Jan Kříž¹ and Petr Šeba¹^,2

¹University of Hradec Králové, Rokitanského 62, CZ – 500 03 Hradec Králové, Czech Republic

²Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Cukrovarnická 10, CZ – 162 53 Praha, Czech Republic

author email corresponding author email

Nonlinear Biomedical Physics 2008, 2:1doi:10.1186/1753-4631-2-1


Published:	22 February 2008

Abstract

Background

Noninvasive recording of movements caused by the heartbeat and the blood circulation is known as ballistocardiography. Several studies have shown the capability of a force plate to detect cardiac activity in the human body. The aim of this paper is to present a new method based on differential geometry of curves to handle multivariate time series obtained by ballistocardiographic force plate measurements.

Results

We show that the recoils of the body caused by cardiac motion and blood circulation provide a noninvasive method of displaying the motions of the heart muscle and the propagation of the pulse wave along the aorta and its branches. The results are compared with the data obtained invasively during a cardiac catheterization. We show that the described noninvasive method is able to determine the moment of a particular heart movement or the time when the pulse wave reaches certain morphological structure.

Conclusions

Monitoring of heart movements and pulse wave propagation may be used e.g. to estimate the aortic pulse wave velocity, which is widely accepted as an index of aortic stiffness with the application of predicting risk of heart disease in individuals. More extended analysis of the method is however needed to assess its possible clinical application.