Development and clinical evaluation of a home healthcare system measuring in toilet, bathtub and bed without attachment of any biological sensors

Abstract

Daily monitoring of health condition at home is important for an effective scheme for early diagnosis, treatment and prevention of lifestyle-related diseases such as adiposis, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. While a number of commercially available devices for home healthcare monitoring are widely used, those are actually cumbersome in terms of self-attachment of biological sensors and self-operation of them. From this viewpoint, we have been developing a non-conscious physiological monitoring system without attachment of any sensors to the human body as well as any operations for the measurement. We developed some devices installed in a toilet, a bath, and a bed and showed their high measurement precision by comparison with simultaneous recordings of ordinary biological sensors directly attached to the body. In order to investigate those applicability to the health condition monitoring, we developed a monitoring system in combination with all of the monitoring devices at hospital rooms and previously carried out the measurements of patients' health condition. Further in this study, the health conditions were measured in 10 patients with cardiovascular disease or sleep disorder. From these results, the patients' health conditions such as the body and excretion weight in the toilet, the ECG during taking the bath and the pulse and respiration rate during sleeping were successfully monitored in the hospital room, demonstrating its usefulness for monitoring the health condition of the subjects with cardiovascular disease or sleep disorder.