In this paper, we address a special case of state and parameter estimation, where the system can be put on a cascade form allowing to estimate the state components and the set of unknown parameters separately. Inspired by the nonlinear Balloon hemodynamic model for functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging problem, we propose a hierarchical approach. The system is divided into two subsystems in cascade. The state and input are first estimated from a noisy measured signal using an adaptive observer. The obtained input is then used to estimate the parameters of a linear system using the modulating functions method. Some numerical results are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method.