A method of measuring blood pressure of a patient is provided. The method comprises inflating a blood pressure cuff to a user selectable target pressure and subsequently further inflating or deflating the blood pressure cuff in a stepwise manner by a predetermined pressure amount. At each pressure step in a first sequence of alternate steps of cuff pressure variation, the occurrence of at least two successive oscillometric pulses with matching pulse amplitude and other possible matching criteria is identified. The blood pressure cuff is inflated following the identification. Further a single oscillometric pulse is obtained at each pressure step in a second sequence of alternate steps of cuff pressure variation. The pattern of inflating, obtaining two matching oscillometric pulses, inflating, and obtaining a single oscillometric pulse is repeated until sufficient oscillometric envelope information is obtained for determining one or more blood pressure parameters of the patient.
