[Paper] DMT: Demographic Conditioning, Morphology-Enhanced Transformer for Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation from PPG Signals
Source: arXiv - 2606.11125v1
Overview
Blood pressure (BP) is a key marker for cardiovascular risk assessment and therapeutic decision-making, and Photoplethysmography (PPG) enables low-cost, wearable-friendly cuffless BP estimation. However, even with recent progress, many PPG-based models are trained with BP regression alone and may rely on amplitude-dominated shortcuts. In addition, demographic covariates that systematically modulate vascular compliance are often incorporated only via late fusion, limiting subject-specific representation learning. We propose a Transformer-based network for cuffless BP estimation from PPG signal, leveraging self-attention to capture long-range dependencies across multiple cardiac cycles. To account for subject-specific vascular differences, the model is conditioned on demographics via FiLM-style feature modulation applied through the attention and feed-forward sublayers of Transformer blocks. In addition, we add an auxiliary morphology head to guide the model to attend to BP-relevant waveform morphology associated with arterial stiffness and wave reflection. Under calibration-based evaluation protocols on the large-scale PulseDB dataset, the proposed method achieves MAE of 4.56 mmHg for systolic BP and 2.62 mmHg for diastolic BP, reducing errors by 47% and 50% compared with prior demographic-enhanced PPG baselines. The resulting lightweight, single-sensor model supports scalable and clinically grounded cuffless BP estimation in calibration-enabled deployment settings.
Key Contributions
This paper presents research in the following areas:
- eess.SP
- cs.LG
Methodology
Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.
Practical Implications
This research contributes to the advancement of eess.SP.
Authors
- Yidan Shen
- Neville Mathew
- Maham Rahimi
- Deependra Dhakal
- George Zouridakis
- Xin Fu
- Renjie Hu
Paper Information
- arXiv ID: 2606.11125v1
- Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG
- Published: June 9, 2026
- PDF: Download PDF