International Journal of Biosensors & Bioelectronics

Research Article Open Access

An android app for receiving, storing and exchanging

blood pressure data way bluetooth, OCR and
gesture input
Abstract Volume 6 Issue 2 - 2020

Telemetry home, mobile technologies, and software application, has a positive effect onthe
José de Jesús Sandoval-Palomares, Javier
monitoring and management of some medical control parameters, and help to be more
effective in the treatments, measuring blood pressure at home is becoming increasingly use
Yañez-Mendiola
Department of Applied research, CIATEC, México
by both clinicians and patients. This work implements a way to obtain information directly
from commercial blood pressure devices,using application programming interface, without Correspondence: José de Jesús Sandoval-Palomares,
to have used the proprietary APP of the brand, use of the optical character recognition and Department of Applied research, CIATEC, A.C, Omega 201,
the use of gestures using the fingers to write each of the blood pressure values; systole, Industrial Delta 37545, León Gto, México, Tel 477710001,
diastole, pressure, date and time and send these data to a Web-DataBase way SMS message Email

Keywords: blood pressure, OCR, gestures, APP, treatment, optical character recognition, Received: November 08, 2019 | Published: June 08, 2020
hypertension

Abbreviations: BP, blood pressure; SMS, short message obtaining various medical parameters, including BP, not necessarily
messages; API, application programming interface; OCR, optical very accurate, as in their indications they express them themselves.
character recognition; APP, application; SFF, structure frame format We found a method to implement a mechanism, to obtain information
directly from commercial BP without having to use the proprietary
Introduction APP of the brand, like the use of the Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) to obtain each of the BP values; systole, diastole and pressure
Monitoring the high blood pressure (BP) help to prevent causes and completing with the use of gestures when using the fingers to
of stroke and other cardiovascular complications.1,2 some national write the value and help for people with some visual impairments.
and international guidelines also recommend home monitoring in With these methods to obtaining BP values from different devices
certain circumstances, in this way, telemetry home and mobile devices and have the possibility to send these data to a Web-DataBase way
technologies has a positive effect in the management of some medical SMS message, is the objective of this project, which also includes
control parameters and help to be more effective in the treatment, implement a universal repository and not depend on brands to monitor
measuring BP at home is becoming increasingly use by both clinicians and control the levels of BP, covering an opportunity where users and
and patients.3–9 Studies apply monitoring BP, watched patients felt clinicians do not have to be changing platforms, APP or repository to
more aware of their heart failure condition, less anxiety, and more help with this problem.
empowered, the clinicians were able to manage their patients heart
failure conditions more effectively, because they had physiological Methods
data reported to them frequently to help in their treatment.10,11 Whereas
some commercial systems for BP have significant research and an The APP interface was developed for Spanish speakers using all
Application (APP) is available, other systems lack apps,12,13 then the screen to help the quick and direct access to all the options menu.
exist the opportunity to improve hypertension control, through easier The menu contain the next options; General Data ( that get the general
logging of repeated BP measurements, better connectivity with health- information of user ), Manual ( allow the manual number capture of
care providers and reminder alerts for medication recommendations.14 systole, diastole, pulsation, date and hour ), Camera/OCR ( get the
Mobile health apps are an ideal tool for monitoring and tracking long- image from the screen of a commercial medical BP device ), Bluetooth
term health conditions. Apps need to succeed in ensuring the privacy, ( allow get the information from a commercial BP monitor), Data
security, and safety of the health data entrusted to them.15 consulting ( shows in a chart the pressure information or shows in a
table the pressure information ), SMS (send the actual records to an
We consider that nowadays all the portable BP measurement external SMS receptor ), Delete Results (which removes current data
device have a monochromatic display to report the measurement from the database ), Website (which refer to the http address where
performed, classically: systole, diastole, pressure, date and time; can view the information in the Web-Database), and Exit (close the
OMRON, A&D MEDICAL, ALMEDIC, IHEALTH, IPROVEN, APP). For the OCR recognition, we used the internal camera from the
to mention brands. Some of these brands provide improve devices android device, the Tesseract SDK for Android, in the OCR we only
giving the communication feature by wireless WIFI or Bluetooth convert the numbers obtained from the images, and only recognize 1
technology as the most widespread, for communicated to smartphones to 3 continuous digits. For manual entry we implement an interface,
or mobile device with IOS or Android operating system and a where the user can use a pencil o directly his finger, follows a digit
proprietary APP of the brand, where users can enter the data obtained Ds-font as a stroke guide. The external connection with the bluetooth
and carry out continuous monitoring. The last trend in this aspect is was with a commercial BP monitor M7-Intelli-IT from Omron Brand.
the use of smart watches, which contain an optical sensor that allows The APP was coded for Android 6.0 operative system, over Android

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©2020 Sandoval-Palomares et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and build upon your work non-commercially.
An android app for receiving, storing and exchanging blood pressure data way bluetooth, OCR and gesture Copyright:
©2020 Sandoval-Palomares et al. 41
input

studio 3.4 and the internal database in SQLite, the Figure 1, shows the 0-9 and the value of hundreds, tens and units independently, if the
general process in the APP. user makes a mistake or wants to delete his stroke, they could double
click on the image of the digit and it will be deleted and will allow
a new capture. The previous procedure has the consideration that if
the user enters a digit in the hundreds or tens and the other missing
sections do not enter anything, the value is considered to be zero and
by extension any missing digit will be zero, for example, entering
hundreds the digit, “2_ _”, will be interpreted as 200, “1_5”, as 105,
in some cases it would be similar, “_8_” would be 80 and for only
units “_ _9” is interpreted as only 9, this helps to write fewer digits
to introduce. The drawn lines corresponding to each digit is saved in
an image that is converted to gray and sent to the Tesseract API that
interprets it and returns the identified digit and is displayed to the user
Figure 1 General process of the android APP for exchanging blood pressure
for confirmation or correctness. When finished, the user presses the
data.
verification button and the value will be displayed in a message, the
Direct manual entry user verifies it and selects the “Ok” or “return” button, if the option
is “return”, the user can modify the value by following the procedure
For manual entry we impended a screen, where the user can write again described, with the option is “OK” the interpreted digits are
each of number for systole, diastole and pulse using the classic scroll stored in the SQLite database.
up-down, in this way, the user select each digit in each scroll Figure
2. We comment than all the values have a maximum and minimums
range, initially is configured like systole 100 y 140mmHg (millimeters
of mercury), diastole 60 y 90mmHg and 60 to 100ppm (pulse per
minute), this values is checked in OCR, finger-gesture writing and
direct manual entry, if data input are outs of this ranges, shows an
error message input data and ask for new data.

Figure 3 Entry by finger-gesture writing screen.

Optical character recognition (OCR)

To apply OCR, we perform text detection and text recognition
using Tesseract API, who is a well-known open source OCR library
that can be integrated with Android apps. One important activity
was the Tesseract installation and configuration of the API of Tess-
Figure 2 Direct manual entry screen. two, this API and instructions was obtained from https://github.com/
rmtheis/tess-two site. We have used the English version of tessdata,
Entry by finger-gesture writing in this case because we used only the number recognition, was
For the implement of a finger-based number input method on configured and processed the jpg image to an Android bitmap with
touchscreen, for normal people with some visual impairments. We 500kb maximum and the set of the text using getUTF8 function.
implement a digit by digit input with the finger; a user sketches a In the Figure 4 shows graphically the process performed for OCR
gesture that passes through the lines in the corresponding segment recognition, which is described below. The user activates the APP
code for digit 0 to 9, as a stroke guide. for this purpose, an interface option to capture values by OCR, then the camera service is activated,
with two sections was developed, in the upper section it was divided for this operation, we use the standard Android camera function, the
into three areas to identify the position of the digits, the lower section user places the camera of the mobile device in a way that the image of
shows how the digit type number should be drawn Ds-font as the the commercial BP monitor and its numbers are seen, Figure 4A. In
visual stroke guide Figure 3. In the upper section, the first area to the the screen, Figure 4B, of the mobile device two sections are shows, the
left corresponding to the hundreds, the next to the right the tens and section one with the full image, with a small rectangle with red edges,
the next to the right and last for the units, this allowed simplifying which helps to place the number, at down the section two , is shown
both the user and technically the entry of a numerical value using the region of the rectangle as a zoom type for a better visualization
finger-gesture. The algorithm for capture works as follows, in the (the correct placement of the area where the number is observed is
screen, specifically in the gesture capture area, the user is asked to 100% controlled by the user), the user captures the image Figure
draw the digit following the tracing guide corresponding to number 4C, this is converted to grayscale, this conversion is limited only the
red rectangle area of the image where the number is observed, this

Citation: Sandoval-Palomares JJ,Yañez-Mendiola J. An android app for receiving, storing and exchanging blood pressure data way bluetooth, OCR and gesture
input. Int J Biosen Bioelectron. 2020;6(2):40‒43. DOI: 10.15406/ijbsbe.2020.06.00186
An android app for receiving, storing and exchanging blood pressure data way bluetooth, OCR and gesture Copyright:
©2020 Sandoval-Palomares et al. 42
input

image is processed with the API of Tesseract Figure 4D to obtain the

numeric value, the identified value is shows and in a message and
Figure 4e, if the numerical data is correct, the user touches the screen
and requests the following numbers, a total 3 numbers are requested,
corresponding to the systole, diastole and pulse, finished the capture
, the data is stored in the SQLite database, Figure 4F, and the screen
with the obtained numbers is presented in the APP screen, Figure 4G.

Figure 7 Interface of APP for gesture input by fingers of blood pressure data.

Figure 4 graphically process performed for OCR recognition, capturing by

image the digits of a portable blood pressure measurement device.

Testing process
Final prototype
The final APP menu is shows in the Figure 5, the interactive with
the big size menu with different icons and colors to allow users select Figure 8 Interface of APP for OCR input by fingers of blood pressure data.
easily the option. The direct manual entry capture option is shows in In the optical character recognition interface implementation was
the Figure 6, in Figure 6a ask the user the systole, diastole and pulse in 3 steps, in test we obtain the image with the number Figure 8A, a
data, and Figure 6b shows data input scroll mechanism, the user does red rectangle to boundary the number and other area to view the zoom
click in number and used the arrows to select the required number, of this number, a second step to make the recognition of number by
Figure 6c shows the input data number. In the entry by finger-gesture OCR technic, finally shown the number in the screen, Figure 8B. Both
writing, the user can have written 3 digits and one guide digits was manual and OCR option each number recognized was send to a screen
implemented to follow the correct way and the recognition be faster, like the Figure 8C, and wait for the user confirmation.
the Figure 7A–7D shows these test steps.
To verify the correct functionality of the system, different pilot
tests were run, a mobile device android 6.0 was turned on and off and
the APP was connected and disconnected and it was tested different
functionalities to verify correct functionality, we followed user case
testing from TI methodology, which allowed verifying that the APP
complied with each of the functionalities designed and encoded.
Verifying the capture by gesture writing was tested several times the
numbers input and some possible variations to verify the implement
recognition algorithm and translate it variations correctly. In the OCR
test, we used different positions of the Android device camera and
BP screen and found the possible variations when the image will be
captured to help in a best algorithm recognizer of OCR technique.
The SMS was verified when taking the data from the database and
correctly formed the data frame and it was received by the external
Figure 5 General menu of the android APP for exchanging blood pressure SMS, in this case a confirmation of reception of the external web
data. was not implemented so as not to complicate this process. The tests
were performed by 3 users who are currently in control of their blood
pressure, helping to identify recommendations on their use and
functionality.

Results
In the direct manual entry, did not present a major problem when
entering the digits, the 3 users intuitively entered these and understood
the mechanics without further explanation. The support of guides that
was implemented in the method of gestures with the finger or pencil
help a lot to resolve some problems, like recognizing the different ways
in which a number is written, for example the number “1” which in
QW some cases came to recognize it as “7”, or the “5” since it was written
more as a “S” and was not recognized and the variations of “4” also
Figure 6 Interface of APP for manual input of blood pressure data.
presented problems, the digit Ds-font guide helped these problems

Citation: Sandoval-Palomares JJ,Yañez-Mendiola J. An android app for receiving, storing and exchanging blood pressure data way bluetooth, OCR and gesture
input. Int J Biosen Bioelectron. 2020;6(2):40‒43. DOI: 10.15406/ijbsbe.2020.06.00186
An android app for receiving, storing and exchanging blood pressure data way bluetooth, OCR and gesture Copyright:
©2020 Sandoval-Palomares et al. 43
input

were drastically solved. In the case of OCR recognition, helped Conflicts of interest
recognize only the digits from 0 to 9, which reduces the processing
time, however, there were more difficulties in taking the image since Authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
this should have been centered on a rectangular region as an area to
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Citation: Sandoval-Palomares JJ,Yañez-Mendiola J. An android app for receiving, storing and exchanging blood pressure data way bluetooth, OCR and gesture
input. Int J Biosen Bioelectron. 2020;6(2):40‒43. DOI: 10.15406/ijbsbe.2020.06.00186