Patent ID: 7727158

Claim:
A method for operating a pulse wave data analyzer to extract vital information out of pulse wave data concerning a living body, the pulse wave data analyzer comprising a central processing unit and a digital signal processor, the method for operating comprising the steps of: employing the pulse wave data analyzer to execute a noise removal step including: detecting bottom values and peak values along a time axis in a time-series manner out of pulse wave data obtained by sequentially measuring a pulse wave of a subject for a predetermined period; making pairs with respect to the bottom values and the peak values adjacent to each other on the time axis to obtain bottom-to-peak amplitude values along the time axis, the bottom-to-peak amplitude values being a difference between the bottom value and the peak value in each of the pairs; and comparing each set of two bottom-to-peak amplitude values adjacent to each other along the time axis to remove the bottom value and the peak value relating to the smaller bottom-to-peak amplitude value in each set as noise, if a ratio of one of the two bottom-to-peak amplitude values to the other one of the two bottom-to-peak amplitude values is larger than a predetermined value; employing the pulse wave data analyzer to obtaining peak-to-peak intervals or bottom-to-bottom intervals corresponding to electrocardiogram RR-intervals based on pulse wave data obtained by executing the noise removal step; and employing the pulse wave data analyzer to output the peak-to-peak intervals or bottom-to-bottom intervals.