Abstract
Pulse wave analysis, or PWA, is a technique based on the morphological analysis of blood pressure waveforms, whose shape reflects crucial information on the properties of the arterial wall and blood pressure itself. Although the first historical developments of PWA date back to the nineteenth century, the technique started to prosper with the development of applanation tonometry in the 1960s. More recently, the approach has been increasingly applied to photoplethysmographic signals, due to the appeal in deriving blood pressure-related information from signals routinely measured in clinical settings. In this chapter, after an introduction on the historical and physiological background of PWA, a review of the waveform features most commonly encountered in the literature is given, followed by an overview of PWA-based clinical studies and an outlook on the clinical potential of the technique.
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Proença, M. et al. (2019). Pulse Wave Analysis Techniques. In: Solà, J., Delgado-Gonzalo, R. (eds) The Handbook of Cuffless Blood Pressure Monitoring. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24701-0_8
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