Smart vest for respiratory rate monitoring of COPD patients based on non-contact capacitive sensing

In this paper, a first approach to the design of a portable device for non-contact monitoring of respiratory rate by capacitive sensing is presented. The sensing system is integrated into a smart vest for an untethered, low-cost and comfortable breathing monitoring of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) patients during the rest period between respiratory rehabilitation exercises at home. To provide an extensible solution to the remote monitoring using this sensor and other devices, the design and preliminary development of an e-Health platform based on the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) paradigm is also presented. In order to validate the proposed solution, two quasi-experimental studies have been developed, comparing the estimations with respect to the golden standard. In a first study with healthy subjects, the mean value of the respiratory rate error, the standard deviation of the error and the correlation coefficient were 0.01 breaths per minute (bpm), 0.97 bpm and 0.995 (p < 0.00001), respectively. In a second study with COPD patients, the values were -0.14 bpm, 0.28 bpm and 0.9988 (p < 0.0000001), respectively. The results for the rest period show the technical and functional feasibility of the prototype and serve as a preliminary validation of the device for respiratory rate monitoring of patients with COPD.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación PI15/00306Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación DTS15/00195Junta de Andalucía PI-0010-2013Junta de Andalucía PI-0041-2014Junta de Andalucía PIN-0394-201

Wireless body sensor networks for health-monitoring applications

This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Physiological Measurement. The publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0967-3334/29/11/R01

Powerline interference suppression of a textile-insulated capacitive biomedical sensor using digital filters

This research evaluated a textile-insulated capacitive (TEX-C) biomedical sensor insulated by six types of textile materials namely cotton, linen, rayon, nylon, polyester, and PVC-textile. Each textile material creates a unique skin-electrode capacitance and affected the susceptibility of the TEX-C biomedical sensor towards the 50 Hz powerline interference (PLI) and its harmonics. Designing versatile TEX-C biosensor hardware that can tolerate different textile insulators while maintaining an optimum signal measurement quality proves to be a significant challenge. Five digital filters such as notch filter, comb filter, discrete wavelet transform, undecimated wavelet transform, and normalized least mean squares adaptive filter were implemented to compare their performance in suppressing the 50 Hz PLI and its harmonics. The comb filter yielded the best results in suppressing the 50 Hz PLI and its harmonics below -130 dB while improving the correlation coefficient of the EMG signals measured by TEX-C biomedical sensors and the wet contact electrode.This research is financially supported by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Grant No. GUP-2021-019 , UKM-TR-011 , and DIP-2020-004 and Qatar National Research Foundation (QNRF) grant no. NPRP12s-0227-190164 and International Research Collaboration Co-Fund (IRCC) grant: IRCC-2021-001 . Open Access publication of this article is supported by Qatar National Library. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.Scopu

A temporal Convolutional Network for EMG compressed sensing reconstruction

Electromyography (EMG) plays a vital role in detecting medical abnormalities and analyzing the biomechanics of human or animal movements. However, long-term EMG signal monitoring will increase the bandwidth requirements and transmission system burden. Compressed sensing (CS) is attractive for resource-limited EMG signal monitoring. However, traditional CS reconstruction algorithms require prior knowledge of the signal, and the reconstruction process is inefficient. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a reconstruction algorithm based on deep learning, which combines the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) and the fully connected layer to learn the mapping relationship between the compressed measurement value and the original signal, and it has been verified in the Ninapro database. The results show that, for the same subject, compared with the traditional reconstruction algorithms orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), basis pursuit (BP), and Modified Compressive Sampling Matching Pursuit (MCo), the reconstruction quality and efficiency of the proposed method is significantly improved under various compression ratios (CR)

Design and Characterization of a Textile Electrode System for the Detection of High-Density sEMG

Muscle activity monitoring in dynamic conditions is a crucial need in different scenarios, ranging from sport to rehabilitation science and applied physiology. The acquisition of surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals by means of grids of electrodes (High-Density sEMG, HD-sEMG) allows obtaining relevant information on muscle function and recruitment strategies. During dynamic conditions, this possibility demands both a wearable and miniaturized acquisition system and a system of electrodes easy to wear, assuring a stable electrode-skin interface. While recent advancements have been made on the former issue, detection systems specifically designed for dynamic conditions are at best incipient. The aim of this work is to design, characterize, and test a wearable, HD-sEMG detection system based on textile technology. A 32-electrodes, 15 mm inter-electrode distance textile grid was designed and prototyped. The electrical properties of the material constituting the detection system and of the electrode-skin interface were characterized. The quality of sEMG signals was assessed in both static and dynamic contractions. The performance of the textile detection system was comparable to that of conventional systems in terms of stability of the traces, properties of the electrode-skin interface and quality of the collected sEMG signals during quasi-isometric and highly dynamic tasks

Tutorial. Surface EMG detection, conditioning and pre-processing: Best practices

This tutorial is aimed primarily to non-engineers, using or planning to use surface electromyography (sEMG) as an assessment tool for muscle evaluation in the prevention, monitoring, assessment and rehabilitation fields. The main purpose is to explain basic concepts related to: (a) signal detection (electrodes, electrode–skin interface, noise, ECG and power line interference), (b) basic signal properties, such as amplitude and bandwidth, (c) parameters of the front-end amplifier (input impedance, noise, CMRR, bandwidth, etc.), (d) techniques for interference and artifact reduction, (e) signal filtering, (f) sampling and (g) A/D conversion, These concepts are addressed and discussed, with examples. The second purpose is to outline best practices and provide general guidelines for proper signal detection, conditioning and A/D conversion, aimed to clinical operators and biomedical engineers. Issues related to the sEMG origin and to electrode size, interelectrode distance and location, have been discussed in a previous tutorial. Issues related to signal processing for information extraction will be discussed in a subsequent tutorial

Analytical Survey of Wearable Sensors

Wearable sensors inWireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) provide health and physical activity monitoring. Modern communication systems have extended this monitoring remotely. In this survey, various types of wearable sensors discussed, their medical applications like ECG, EEG, blood pressure, detection of blood glucose level, pulse rate, respiration rate and non medical applications like daily exercise monitoring and motion detection of different body parts. Different types of noise removing filters also discussed at the end that are helpful in to remove noise from ECG signals. Main purpose of this survey is to provide a platform for researchers in wearable sensors for WBANs.Comment: BioSPAN with 7th IEEE International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA 2012), Victoria, Canada, 201