Patent ID: 6845263

Claim:
A system for obtaining information relating to a propagation velocity at which a pulse wave propagates along an artery of a living subject, the system comprising: a heart-sound detecting apparatus comprising: a heart-sound microphone which detects a plurality of heart sounds produced by a heart of a living subject and outputs a heart-sound signal representative of the detected heart sounds; a smoothing device for smoothing, by differentiation, a waveform of the heart-sound signal output from the heart-sound microphone; a squaring device for squaring an amplitude of the smoothed waveform with respect to a base line of the heart-sound signal; and a start-point determining device for determining a start point of a first heart sound I as one of the plurality of detected heart sounds, based on that the squared amplitude being greater than a prescribed threshold value; a pulse-wave detecting device which is adapted to be worn on the subject to detect the pulse wave which propagates along the artery of the subject; and a pulse-wave-propagation-velocity-relating-information obtaining device for obtaining information based on a time of the start point of the first heart sound I determined by the start-point determining device of the heart-sound detecting apparatus, and a time when a rising point of the pulse wave is detected by the pulse-wave detecting device.