Abstract
Unobtrusive and continuous monitoring of vital signs is becoming more and more important both for patient monitoring in the home environment and for sports activity tracking. Even though many gadgets and clinical systems exist, the need for simple, low-cost and easily applicable solutions still remains, especially in view of a more widespread use within everyone’s reach. The paper presents a fully wearable and wireless sensorized belt, suitable to simultaneously acquire respiratory and cardiac signals employing a single acquisition channel. The adopted method relies on a 50-kHz current injected in the subject thorax through a couple of textile electrodes and on envelope detection of the trans-thoracic voltage acquired from a couple of different embedded electrodes. The resulting signal contains both the baseband electrocardiogram (ECG) signal and the trans-thoracic impedance signal, which encodes respiratory acts. The two signals can be easily separated through suitable filtering and the cardio–respiratory rates extracted. The proposed solution yields performances comparable to those of a spirometer and a two-lead ECG. The whole system, with a realization cost below 100 €, a wireless interface, and several hours (or even days) of autonomy, is a suitable candidate for everyday use, especially if complemented by motion artifact removal techniques, currently under implementation.
Highlights
Continuous monitoring and diagnosis through non-invasive measurements of vital signs represent two concrete technological responses to the challenges of care personalization and cost containment posed by modern medicine
After performing the preliminary experiments with the data acquisition (DAQ) card acquiring the instrumentation amplifier output, which allowed the demonstration of the detection principle illustrated in Section 2.2, several acquisitions were performed with the developed wearable belt, showing its capabilities in terms of simultaneous cardio–respiratory monitoring
The signal received by the PC with connected access point has been processed by the LabVIEW virtual instrument, which is able to separate the respiratory and heartbeat components
Summary
Continuous monitoring and diagnosis through non-invasive measurements of vital signs represent two concrete technological responses to the challenges of care personalization and cost containment posed by modern medicine. Nowadays, measuring vital signs continuously and non-invasively can be an invaluable tool for physicians that can make timely decisions and better choices when long-term patient data are available, preventing diseases and enhancing quality of life whilst reducing the costs of health care [4]. The electrocardiogram is the adopted gold standard. It makes use of electrodes placed on the skin, that register the electrical activity related to the cyclic cardiac muscle depolarization and repolarization
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