Smart Vest for Respiratory and Physical Activity Monitoring in COPD Patients

Abstract

Rehabilitation treatment of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) based on muscle training provides clear benefits in health and quality of life. Its positive effects are usually diminished once the training is over, and the effectiveness of home maintenance programs is limited due to the lack of motivation and adherence of patients, as well as by the reduction of clinical supervision. In this work, the preliminary design and first results of a smart vest for the motivation and evaluation of patients with COPD in home maintenance programs are presented. The physical activity (metabolic expenditure and number of repetitions of the exercises) and the respiratory pattern of the patient are the parameters monitored through the built-in sensors in the smart vest. The processing of the information is distributed between the smart vest and a smartphone, which also acts as user interface and link for the management and remote data storage. Bidirectional wireless communications between the smart vest and the smartphone are based on a waveform preprocessing protocol over the standard Bluetooth 4.1, whose purpose is to reduce energy consumption. A preliminary study with healthy volunteers in a controlled environment has shown the feasibility of the proposed solution (100% accuracy in the number of exercise repetitions, close correspondence between the monitoring tests of metabolic expenditure and breathing and the pre-established patterns).