The Design and Implementation of Intelligent Labor Contraction Monitoring System based on Wearable Internet of Things

In current clinical practice, pregnant women who have entered 37 weeks cannot correctly judge whether they are in labor based on their subjective feelings. Wrong judgment of labor contraction can lead to adverse pregnancy outcomes and endanger the safety of mothers and babies. It will also increase the healthcare pressure in the hospital and the healthcare efficiency is reduced. Therefore, it is very meaningful to be able to design a system for monitoring labor contraction based on objective data to assist pregnant women who have entered 37 weeks in deciding the suitable time to go to hospital. For the above requirements, this thesis designs and implements an intelligent labor contraction monitoring system based on wearable Internet of Things. The system combines the Internet of Things technology, wearable technology and machine learning technology to collect contraction data through wearable sensing device. It uses the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network to classify and identify the collected contraction data and realize real-time processing. It improves the accuracy of model recognition to 93.75%. And the recognition results are fed back to the WeChat applet so that pregnant women can view them in real time. The prototype of the wearable sensing device has been integrated by 3D printing and the proof-of-concept system has been demonstrated. Pregnant women can use this system to detect the contraction status and view the contractions in real time through the WeChat applet results. They can judge whether it is suitable for labor, and this system assists in making decisions about the best time to go to hospital

Advances in Minimally Invasive Surgery

The minimally invasive approach in medicine is one of the most common areas of interest in surgery.Advances in Minimally Invasive Surgery describes the latest trends, indications, techniques, and approaches in minimally invasive surgery. It provides step-by-step instructions for both routine and diagnostic procedures via illustrations and video collection

Soft Electronics and Sensors for Wearable Healthcare Applications

Wearable electronics are becoming increasingly essential to personalized medicine by collecting and analyzing massive amounts of biological signals from internal organs, muscles, and blood vessels. Conventional rigid electronics may lead to motion artifacts and errors in collected data due to the mismatches in mechanical properties between human skin. Instead, soft wearable electronics provide a better platform and interface that can form intimate contact and conformably adapt to human skin. In this respect, this thesis focuses on new materials formulation, fabrication, characterization of low-cost, high sensitivity and reliable sensors for wearable health monitoring applications. More specifically, we have studied the silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) inkjet-printed on a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate that offers great pressure sensitivity for aterial pulse monitoring. In addition, we have investigated the conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) and poly(ethylene oxide) PEO polymer blends that exhibit low sheet resistance and can resist up to 50\% of tensile strain. The highly stretchable thin film can serve as interconnects between electronic components and dry electrodes for photoplethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiography (ECG) recordings. Based on the developed PEDOT:PSS solution with high conductivity, we fabricated a porous PDMS sponge coated with conductive PEDOT:PSS to make electrodes with reduced electrode-skin contact impedance, improved signal-to-noise ratio and is suited for long-term and motion-artifact-tolerant recording of high quality biopotential signals including ECG and electromyography (EMG). Finally, we demonstrated a multimodal sensor based on the porous PEDOT:PSS/PDMS sponge for sensing and distinguishing of pressure, strain and temperature from different trends in resistance and capacitance response. Applications including object detection, gesture recognition and temperature sensing have all been demonstrated. In this thesis, the proposed materials, sensor design, low-cost inkjet printing and dip-coating fabrication process open the possibility for more complex epidermal wearable health monitoring electronic systems

Human Health Engineering Volume II

In this Special Issue on “Human Health Engineering Volume II”, we invited submissions exploring recent contributions to the field of human health engineering, i.e., technology for monitoring the physical or mental health status of individuals in a variety of applications. Contributions could focus on sensors, wearable hardware, algorithms, or integrated monitoring systems. We organized the different papers according to their contributions to the main parts of the monitoring and control engineering scheme applied to human health applications, namely papers focusing on measuring/sensing physiological variables, papers highlighting health-monitoring applications, and examples of control and process management applications for human health. In comparison to biomedical engineering, we envision that the field of human health engineering will also cover applications for healthy humans (e.g., sports, sleep, and stress), and thus not only contribute to the development of technology for curing patients or supporting chronically ill people, but also to more general disease prevention and optimization of human well-being

Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications

This book focuses on new sensing technologies, measurement techniques, and their applications in medicine and healthcare. Specifically, the book briefly describes the potential of smart sensors in the aforementioned applications, collecting 24 articles selected and published in the Special Issue “Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications”. We proposed this topic, being aware of the pivotal role that smart sensors can play in the improvement of healthcare services in both acute and chronic conditions as well as in prevention for a healthy life and active aging. The articles selected in this book cover a variety of topics related to the design, validation, and application of smart sensors to healthcare

XXII International Conference on Mechanics in Medicine and Biology - Abstracts Book

This book contain the abstracts presented the XXII ICMMB, held in Bologna in September 2022. The abstracts are divided following the sessions scheduled during the conference

Recent Developments in Smart Healthcare

Medicine is undergoing a sector-wide transformation thanks to the advances in computing and networking technologies. Healthcare is changing from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive and personalized, from disease focused to well-being centered. In essence, the healthcare systems, as well as fundamental medicine research, are becoming smarter. We anticipate significant improvements in areas ranging from molecular genomics and proteomics to decision support for healthcare professionals through big data analytics, to support behavior changes through technology-enabled self-management, and social and motivational support. Furthermore, with smart technologies, healthcare delivery could also be made more efficient, higher quality, and lower cost. In this special issue, we received a total 45 submissions and accepted 19 outstanding papers that roughly span across several interesting topics on smart healthcare, including public health, health information technology (Health IT), and smart medicine

Algorithms and systems for home telemonitoring in biomedical applications

During the past decades, the interest of the healthcare community shifted from the simple treatment of the diseases towards the prevention and maintenance of a healthy lifestyle. This approach is associated to a reduced cost for the Health Systems, having to face the constantly increased expenditures due to the reduced mortality for chronical diseases and to the progressive population ageing. Nevertheless, the high costs related to hospitalization of patients for monitoring procedures that could be better performed at home hamper the full implementation of this approach in a traditional way. Information and Communication Technology can provide a solution to implement a care model closer to the patient, crossing the physical boundaries of the hospitals and thus allowing to reach also those patients that, for a geographical or social condition, could not access the health services as other luckier subjects. This is the case of telemonitoring systems, whose aim is that of providing monitoring services for some health-related parameters at a distance, by means of custom-designed electronic devices. In this thesis, the specific issues associated to two telemonitoring applications are presented, along with the proposed solutions and the achieved results. The first telemonitoring application considered is the fetal electrocardiography. Non-invasive fetal electrocardiography is the recording of the fetal heart electrical activity using electrodes placed on the maternal abdomen. It can provide important diagnostic parameters, such as the beat-to-beat heart rate variability, whose recurring analysis would be useful in assessing and monitoring fetal health during pregnancy. Long term electrocardiographic monitoring is sustained by the absence of any collateral effects for both the mother and the fetus. This application has been tackled from several perspectives, mainly acquisition and processing. From the acquisition viewpoint a study on different skin treatments, disposable commercial electrodes and textile electrodes has been performed with the aim of improving the signal acquisition quality, while simplifying the measurement setup. From the processing viewpoint, different algorithms have been developed to allow extracting the fetal ECG heart rate, starting from an on-line ICA algorithm or exploiting a subtractive approach to work on recordings acquired with a reduced number of electrodes. The latter, took part to the international "Physionet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge" in 2013 entering into the top ten best-performing open-source algorithms. The improved version of this algorithm is also presented, which would mark the 5th and 4th position in the final ranking related to the fetal heart rate and fetal RR interval measurements performance, reserved to the open-source challenge entries, taking into account both official and unofficial entrants. The research in this field has been carried out in collaboration with the Pediatric Cardiology Unit of the Hospital G. Brotzu in Cagliari, for the acquisition of non-invasive fetal ECG signals from pregnant voluntary patients. The second telemonitoring application considered is the telerehabilitation of the hand. The execution of rehabilitation exercises has been proven to be effective in recovering hand functionality in a wide variety of invalidating diseases, but the lack of standardization and continuous medical control cause the patients neglecting this therapeutic procedures. Telemonitoring the rehabilitation sessions would allow the physician to closely follow the patients' progresses and compliance to the prescribed adapted exercises. This application leads to the development of a sensorized telerehabilitation system for the execution and objective monitoring of therapeutic exercises at the patients' home and of the telemedicine infrastructure that give the physician the opportunity to monitor patients' progresses through parameters summarizing the patients' performance. The proposed non-CE marked medical device, patent pending, underwent a clinical trial, reviewed and approved by the Italian Public Health Department, involving 20 patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis and 20 with Systemic Sclerosis randomly assigned to the experimental or the control arm, enrolled for 12 weeks in a home rehabilitation program. The trial, carried out with the collaboration of the Rheumatology Department of the Policlinico Universitario of Cagliari, revealed promising results in terms of hand functionality recovering, highlighting greater improvements for the patients enrolled in the experimental arm, that use the proposed telerehabilitation system, with respect to those of the control arm, which perform similar rehabilitation exercises using common objects

Imaging Sensors and Applications

In past decades, various sensor technologies have been used in all areas of our lives, thus improving our quality of life. In particular, imaging sensors have been widely applied in the development of various imaging approaches such as optical imaging, ultrasound imaging, X-ray imaging, and nuclear imaging, and contributed to achieve high sensitivity, miniaturization, and real-time imaging. These advanced image sensing technologies play an important role not only in the medical field but also in the industrial field. This Special Issue covers broad topics on imaging sensors and applications. The scope range of imaging sensors can be extended to novel imaging sensors and diverse imaging systems, including hardware and software advancements. Additionally, biomedical and nondestructive sensing applications are welcome