Smartphone Homecare Monitoring of Hearts

Abstract

Homecare monitoring blood pressures and heartbeats are commercially available using dedicated devices, for example, wrist watch, pulse oximetry. With the advent of Smartphone and compressive sensing technology, we wish to monitor precisely the electrical waveforms of heartbeats called the electrocardiography (ECG) for an aging global villager biomedical wellness homecare system. Our design separates into 3 innovative modules within the size-weight and power-cost bandwidth (Swap-CB) limitation. We develop each separately but in concert with one another: (i) Smart Electrode (adopting a low-power-mixed signal embedded with modern compressive sensing firmware and applying the nanotechnology to improve the electrodes’ contact impedance as well as novel transduction mechanism, between ECG and electronics, e.g., a pressure mattress coupling, or fiber-optics coupling); (ii) Learnable Database (utilizing adaptive wavelets transforms for systolic and diastolic P-QRS-T-U features extraction Aided Target Recognition and adopting Sequential Query Language for a relational database allowing distant monitoring and retrievable); (iii) Smartphone (inheriting a large touch screen interface display with powerful computation capability and assisting caretaker reporting system with GPS and ID and two-way interaction with patient panic button for programmable emergence reporting procedure). While (i) is novel, (ii) and (iii) are mature. Together, they can eventually provide a supplementary home screening system for the post- or the prediagnosis care at home with a built-in database searchable with the time, the place, and the degree of urgency happened, using in situ screening.