Instrumented Wearable Belt for Wireless Health Monitoring

The ability to monitor the health status of elderly patients or patients undergoing therapy at home enables significant advantages in terms of both cost and comfort of the subject. However, such non-clinical applications of biomedical signal monitoring require various improvements not only in terms of size and comfort of the acquisition systems, but also in terms of their power dissipation. The research activity is concerned with the development of a novel wearable biomedical signal sensor device for monitoring health conditions at home. The wearable monitoring system consists of two subsystems: firstly, a wearable data acquisition hardware, where the sensors for acquiring the biomedical parameters are integrated, and secondly, a remote monitoring station placed separately and connected to internet for telemedicine applications. The physiological parameters that are monitored with the proposed instrumented wearable belt are electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate (HR) derived from ECG signals by determining the R-R intervals, body temperature, respiratory rate, and three axis movement (acceleration and position) of the subject measured using an accelerometer. In order to design and construct the signal acquisition circuits efficiently and simply, modular design concept is adopted in this research. Three basic high quality and flexible modules for signal conditioning are designed and assembled together for satisfying each sensor. Human biomedical parameters can be registered and analyzed continuously during home work activities. Proper evaluation of those parameters would let immediately know about sudden health state changes, accidental injury or another menacing danger befalling patients at home. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.