PhysioDroid: Combining Wearable Health Sensors and Mobile Devices for a Ubiquitous, Continuous, and Personal Monitoring

Technological advances on the development of mobile devices, medical sensors, and wireless communication systems support a new generation of unobtrusive, portable, and ubiquitous health monitoring systems for continuous patient assessment and more personalized health care. There exist a growing number of mobile apps in the health domain; however, little contribution has been specifically provided, so far, to operate this kind of apps with wearable physiological sensors. The PhysioDroid, presented in this paper, provides a personalized means to remotely monitor and evaluate users’ conditions. The PhysioDroid system provides ubiquitous and continuous vital signs analysis, such as electrocardiogram, heart rate, respiration rate, skin temperature, and body motion, intended to help empower patients and improve clinical understanding. The PhysioDroid is composed of a wearable monitoring device and an Android app providing gathering, storage, and processing features for the physiological sensor data. The versatility of the developed app allows its use for both average users and specialists, and the reduced cost of the PhysioDroid puts it at the reach of most people. Two exemplary use cases for health assessment and sports training are presented to illustrate the capabilities of the PhysioDroid. Next technical steps include generalization to other mobile platforms and health monitoring devices.This work was partially supported by the Spanish CICYT Project SAF2010-20558, Junta de Andalucia Project P09-TIC-175476, and the FPU Spanish Grant AP2009-2244. This work was also supported in part by the INTERREG IV European Project WHM-Wireless Health Monitoring (I-1-02=091) and the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme FP7 Project OPENi-Open-Source, Web-Based, Framework for Integrating Applications with Social Media Services, and Personal Cloudlets under Grant no. 317883

Context-aware system for cardiac condition monitoring and management: a survey

Health monitoring assists physicians in the decision-making process, which in turn, improves quality of life. As technology advances, the usage and applications of context-aware systems continue to spread across different areas in patient monitoring and disease management. It provides a platform for healthcare professionals to assess the health status of patients in their care using multiple relevant parameters. In this survey, we consider context-aware systems proposed by researchers for health monitoring and management. More specifically, we investigate different technologies and techniques used for cardiac condition monitoring and management. This paper also propose "mCardiac", an enhanced context-aware decision support system for cardiac condition monitoring and management during rehabilitation

A Mobile Healthcare Solution for Ambient Assisted Living Environments

Elderly people need regular healthcare services and, several times, are dependent of physicians’ personal attendance. This dependence raises several issues to elders, such as, the need to travel and mobility support. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Mobile Health (m-Health) services and applications offer good healthcare solutions that can be used both on indoor and in mobility environments. This dissertation presents an ambient assisted living (AAL) solution for mobile environments. It includes elderly biofeedback monitoring using body sensors for data collection offering support for remote monitoring. The used sensors are attached to the human body (such as the electrocardiogram, blood pressure, and temperature). They collect data providing comfort, mobility, and guaranteeing efficiency and data confidentiality. Periodic collection of patients’ data is important to gather more accurate measurements and to avoid common risky situations, like a physical fall may be considered something natural in life span and it is more dangerous for senior people. One fall can out a life in extreme cases or cause fractures, injuries, but when it is early detected through an accelerometer, for example, it can avoid a tragic outcome. The presented proposal monitors elderly people, storing collected data in a personal computer, tablet, or smartphone through Bluetooth. This application allows an analysis of possible health condition warnings based on the input of supporting charts, and real-time bio-signals monitoring and is able to warn users and the caretakers. These mobile devices are also used to collect data, which allow data storage and its possible consultation in the future. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated and validated through a prototype and it is ready for use. The watch Texas ez430-Chronos, which is capable to store information for later analysis and the sensors Shimmer who allow the creation of a personalized application that it is capable of measuring biosignals of the patient in real time is described throughout this dissertation

The role of electrocardiography in occupational medicine, from einthoven’s invention to the digital era of wearable devices

Clinical-instrumental investigations, such as electrocardiography (ECG), represent a corollary of a procedures that, nowadays, is called upon as part of the principles of precision medicine. However when carrying out the professional routine examinations, most tend to ignore how a “simple” instrument can offer indispensable support in clinical practice, even in occupational medicine. The advent of the digital age, made of silicon and printed circuit boards, has allowed the miniaturization of the electronic components of these electro-medical devices. Finally, the adoption of patient wearables in medicine has been rapidly expanding worldwide for a number of years. This has been driven mainly by consumers’ demand to monitor their own health. With the ongoing research and development of new features capable of assessing and transmitting real-time biometric data, the impact of wearables on cardiovascular management has become inevitable. Despite the potential offered by this technology, as evident from the scientific literature, the application of these devices in the field of health and safety in the workplace is still limited. This may also be due to the lack of targeted scientific research. While offering great potential, it is very important to consider and evaluate ethical aspects related to the use of these smart devices, such as the management of the collected data relating to the physiological parameters and the location of the worker. This technology is to be considered as being aimed at monitoring the subject’s physiological parameters, and not at the diagnosis of any pathological condition, which should always be on charge of the medical specialist We conducted a review of the evolution of the role that electrophysiology plays as part of occupational health and safety management and on its possible future use, thanks to ongoing technological innovation

Study On Heart Rate Visualisation Using Combination Of Real Time Heart Rate Detection And Augmented Reality

Heartbeat is a natural process which the heart continuously beating without any control from the living thing while heart rate is the speed of the heartbeat measured by the number of contractions of the heart per minute (BPM). There are few methods that can be used to check heart rate. Traditionally, heart rate is check by placing a finger on wrist or temple area and the pulse is counted in one minute. There are few devices that can be used to check the heart rate such as a stethoscope, electrocardiogram (ECG) and chest strap. This paper presents the study on the comparison of these devices that are commonly used nowadays. As analysis being done, none of the existing devices provide visualization features that enable user to see how the heart beating process happen in a human’s body. This paper also presents the study on providing visualization of heart beating process by using Augmented Reality in delivering health information to improve the understanding on user heart condition whiles getting their real-time heart rate. Since AR is one of the new emerging technologies, it can be used to visualize the user heart beat in real time and user can interact with the application to get details of their heart condition. This project also aimed to encourage the user to do frequent heart rate checkup in order to let them monitor their health by providing interactive features of ‘Lean Touch’ where heart model can be scaled, moved, and zoome

Body sensor network for in-home personal healthcare

A body sensor network solution for personal healthcare under an indoor environment is developed. The system is capable of logging the physiological signals of human beings, tracking the orientations of human body, and monitoring the environmental attributes, which covers all necessary information for the personal healthcare in an indoor environment. The major three chapters of this dissertation contain three subsystems in this work, each corresponding to one subsystem: BioLogger, PAMS and CosNet. Each chapter covers the background and motivation of the subsystem, the related theory, the hardware/software design, and the evaluation of the prototype’s performance

Wearable devices for health remote monitor system

It is feasible to see how communication and information technology have advanced at a rapid pace in today’s world. The introduction and emergence of wearable technology is one aspect that contributes to this advancement and has the potential to be an innovative solution to healthcare challenges, since it may be used for illness prevention and maintenance, such as physical monitoring, as well as patient management. To address some of the healthcare challenges, this research thesis provides a research methodology, research questions, and hypotheses for constructing an health remote monitoring system with alerts and continuous monitoring employing wearable devices capable of collecting biometric data on human health. The concept was then proven by the development of a prototype using wearable devices connected to a microcontroller, which transmits its data via MQTT Protocol to a Node-RED powered dashboard that handles health metrics monitoring and where all monitoring performed, and alarms generated can be viewed in real-time. All this data is delivered to a MongoDB database for further analysis and visualization. To demonstrate the effectiveness and capabilities of this prototype, it was used in the real world and the results were acquired from two distinct users. The results were very favorable and conclusive, demonstrating that the created prototype was satisfactory in providing data to support the developed hypotheses and research questions.É possível observar como as tecnologias de comunicação e informação avançaram a um ritmo bastante acelerado nos dias de hoje. A introdução e aparecimento da tecnologia ”wearable” representa um aspeto que contribui para este progresso e tem o potencial de ser uma solução inovadora para os desafios dos cuidados de saúde, uma vez que pode ser utilizada para a prevenção e manutenção de doenças, tais como a monitorização física, bem como para a gestão de pacientes. Para abordar alguns dos desafios dos cuidados de saúde, esta tese de investigação propõe uma metodologia de investigação, questões de investigação, e hipóteses para o desenvolvimento de um sistema inteligente de monitorização da saúde com alertas e monitorização contínua utilizando wearable devices capazes de recolher dados biométricos de seres humanos. O conceito foi então provado pelo desenvolvimento de um protótipo utilizando wearable devices conectados a um microcontrolador, que transmite os seus dados através do Protocolo MQTT a um painel de instrumentos alimentado por o Node-RED que lida com a monitorização de métricas de saúde e onde toda a monitorização executada, e os alarmes gerados, podem ser visualizados em tempo real e depois entregues numa base de dados MongoDB para posterior análise e visualização. Para demonstrar a eficácia deste protótipo, este foi implementado no mundo real onde foram adquiridos vários resultados através da utilização de dois utilizadores distintos. Os resultados foram bastante favoráveis e conclusivos, demonstrando que o protótipo criado foi satisfatório no fornecimento de dados para apoiar as hipóteses e questões de investigação desenvolvidas

Stress treatment through virtual reality

Treball Final de Grau. Grau en Disseny i Desenvolupament de Videojocs. Codi: VJ1241. Curs acadèmic 2016/2017This technical report presents the design and implementation details involved in the development of an interactive environment using the Unity3D game engine. The main objective of this project is to decrease the user’s stress level. To achieve this objective the project consists of a virtual reality application that includes different relaxation techniques like audios, images and graphic elements. Moreover, the application obtains and uses user data from an external sensor, eHealth. These dates are indices of skin temperature and conductance and are used to calculate the stress level of the user during the virtual experience. The application is for Android devices, using Cardboard glasses and a bluetooth gamepad to move inside the environment. The virtual experience consists in an interactive environment in third-person in which the user can walk through the stage, exploring the scene while a relaxing background music is played and accesing to other scenes consisting in relaxation audio guides and relaxing places (taking advantage of the realism of virtual reality). As said before, this project was developed using mainly Unity3D, although I also used software like MonoDeveloped and Visual Studio 2017 for developing the codebase, 3ds Max for modeling, animating and texturizing, Adobe Photoshop CS6 for texture customizing, Arduino for the eHealth Sensor implementation and Word 2016 for the creation of this report