Implementation of the Time Series and the Convolutional Vision Transformers for Biological Signal Processing - Blood Pressure Estimation from Photoplethysmogram

Blood pressure estimation is crucial for early detection and prevention of many cardiovascular diseases. This paper explores the potential of the relatively new transformer architecture for accomplishing this task in the domain of biological signal processing. Several preceding studies of blood pressure estimation solely for PPG signals have had success with CNN and LSTM neural networks. In this study two types of transformer variants are considered: the time series and the convolutional vision transformers. The results obtained from our research indicate that this type of approach may be unsuitable for the task. However, further research is needed to make a definitive claim, since only simple transformer type are considered.