Development of a blood-pressure transducer for the temporal artery. NASA CR-293.

This report describes three phases of research on the direct force method of externally measuring arterial blood pressure. First, a miniaturized transducer was designed specifically for application on the superficial temporal artery of man. This device incorporateda differentialtransformer sensing element with special mounting to reduce response to acceleration. Second, a transducer of earlier design, intended for the radial artery of man and using strain-gauge techniques was extensively tested on experimental animals and compared with direct intra-arterial measurements. Finally, a number of techniques for the sensing of the transducer position over the artery were investigated both theoretically and experimentally.