Wearable and Implantable Wireless Sensor Network Solutions for Healthcare Monitoring

Wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies are considered one of the key research areas in computer science and the healthcare application industries for improving the quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of current developments and future direction of research on wearable and implantable body area network systems for continuous monitoring of patients. This paper explains the important role of body sensor networks in medicine to minimize the need for caregivers and help the chronically ill and elderly people live an independent life, besides providing people with quality care. The paper provides several examples of state of the art technology together with the design considerations like unobtrusiveness, scalability, energy efficiency, security and also provides a comprehensive analysis of the various benefits and drawbacks of these systems. Although offering significant benefits, the field of wearable and implantable body sensor networks still faces major challenges and open research problems which are investigated and covered, along with some proposed solutions, in this paper

Introducing a new dosimeter for the assessment and monitoring of vocal risk situations and voice disorders

Summary: Purpose. There are many physiological parameters recorded by devices that are becoming more affordable, precise and accurate. However, the lack of development in the recording of voice parameters from the physiological or medical point of view is striking, given that it is a fundamental tool for the work of many people and given the high incidence and prevalence of voice pathologies that affect people’s communication. In this paper we perform a complete literature review on the dosimeters used in voice research and to present a pro- totype dosimeter with a pilot study to show its capabilities. Method. We conducted a literature review using the keywords [MONITORING], [PHONATION], [ACCU- MULATOR], [PORTABLE], [DOSIMETRY], [VOICE] searching in PubMed, Trip Database, HONcode, and SciELO search engines. From our review of dosimeter designs, we created our own prototype consisting of two main components: a Knowles Electronics BU-7135-0000 accelerometer mounted on a neck brace; and the ultra- low power MSP430FR5994 microcontroller. The selected sampling frequency was 2048 Hz. The device calculates the F0 every 250 ms and the amplitude and phonation activity every 31.25 ms. A pilot study was conducted using 2 subjects: one male during 11 days and one female during 14 days. Results. This work includes devices that have been created during the last 45 years as tools for the diagnosis and monitoring of the treatment of cases of vocal pathology and for the detection of phonatory patterns or risk situa- tions for developing voice disorders or vocal pathologies. We also present recordings with our new device on the pattern of daily talk time, the fundamental frequency and the relative intensity of two subjects on different days. Conclusions. Interesting work has been done in the development of voice dosimeters with different approaches. In our experience it is not possible to access them for research and they are not yet in clinical use. It is possible that a joint approach with voice and voice disorders professionals and engineers working closely together could take advantage of current technology to develop a fully portable, useful, and efficient system

Review of Wearable Devices and Data Collection Considerations for Connected Health

Wearable sensor technology has gradually extended its usability into a wide range of well-known applications. Wearable sensors can typically assess and quantify the wearer’s physiology and are commonly employed for human activity detection and quantified self-assessment. Wearable sensors are increasingly utilised to monitor patient health, rapidly assist with disease diagnosis, and help predict and often improve patient outcomes. Clinicians use various self-report questionnaires and well-known tests to report patient symptoms and assess their functional ability. These assessments are time consuming and costly and depend on subjective patient recall. Moreover, measurements may not accurately demonstrate the patient’s functional ability whilst at home. Wearable sensors can be used to detect and quantify specific movements in different applications. The volume of data collected by wearable sensors during long-term assessment of ambulatory movement can become immense in tuple size. This paper discusses current techniques used to track and record various human body movements, as well as techniques used to measure activity and sleep from long-term data collected by wearable technology devices

A Mobile ECG Monitoring System with Context Collection

An objective of a health process is one where patients can stay healthy with the support of expert medical advice when they need it, at any location and any time. An associated aim would be the development of a system which places increased emphasis on preventative measures as a first point of contact with the patient. This research is a step along the road towards this type of preventative healthcare for cardiac patients. It seeks to develop a smart mobile ECG monitoring system that requests and records context information about what is happening around the subject when an arrhythmia event occurs. Context information about the subject’s activities of daily living will, it is hoped, provide an enriched data set for clinicians and so improve clinical decision making. As a first step towards a mobile cardiac wellness guidelines system, the focus of this work is to develop a system that can receive bio-signals wirelessly, analyzing and storing the bio-signal in a handheld device and can collect context information when there are significant changes in bio-signs. For this purpose the author will use a low cost development environment to program a state of the art wireless prototype on a handheld computer that detects and responds to changes in the heart rate as calculated form the interval between successive heart beats. Although the general approach take in this work could be applied to a wide range of bio-signals, the research will focus on ECG signals. The pieces of the system are, A wireless receiver, data collection and storage module An efficient real time ECG beat detection algorithm A rule based (Event-Condition-Action) interactive system A simple user interface, which can request additional information form the user. A selection of real-time ECG detection algorithms have been investigated and one algorithm was implemented in MATLAB [110] and then in Java [142] for this project. In order to collect ECG signals (and in principle any signals) the generalised data collection architecture has also been developed utilizing Java [142] and Bluetooth [5] technology. This architecture uses an implementation of the abstract factory pattern [91] to ensure that the communication channel can be changed conveniently. Another core part of this project is a “wellness” guideline based on Event-Condition-Action (E-C-A) [68] production rule approach that originated in active databases. The work also focuses on design of a guideline based expert system which an E-C-A based implementation will be fully event driven using the Java programming language. Based on the author’s experience and the literature review, some important issues in mobile healthcare along with the corresponding reasons, consequences and possible solutions will be presented

A Survey Study of the Current Challenges and Opportunities of Deploying the ECG Biometric Authentication Method in IoT and 5G Environments

The environment prototype of the Internet of Things (IoT) has opened the horizon for researchers to utilize such environments in deploying useful new techniques and methods in different fields and areas. The deployment process takes place when numerous IoT devices are utilized in the implementation phase for new techniques and methods. With the wide use of IoT devices in our daily lives in many fields, personal identification is becoming increasingly important for our society. This survey aims to demonstrate various aspects related to the implementation of biometric authentication in healthcare monitoring systems based on acquiring vital ECG signals via designated wearable devices that are compatible with 5G technology. The nature of ECG signals and current ongoing research related to ECG authentication are investigated in this survey along with the factors that may affect the signal acquisition process. In addition, the survey addresses the psycho-physiological factors that pose a challenge to the usage of ECG signals as a biometric trait in biometric authentication systems along with other challenges that must be addressed and resolved in any future related research.