2015 International Conference on Pervasive Computing (ICPC)
Wearable sensors and patient monitoring system: A
Review
Shraddha D. Deshmukh
Electronics department
Vishwakarma Institute of Technology
Pune, Maharashtra, India
shraddha.deshmukh13@vit.edu
Abstract-Nowadays wearable sensors are drawing
attention in biomedical field. Main reason for that is a
continuous development in sensor technologies. These
developments are in the form of smart sensors, sensors
build textile etc, and also it includes advances in the
technologies such as microcontroller and wireless.
Wearable sensors are used to do continuous monitoring of
parameters which are very much important in
cardiovascular diseases such as heart pulse, temperature,
respiration rate, oxygen rate, body posture etc. Focus on
such sensors is given in this paper.
Keywords-Alerts, Cardiovascular diseases, Healthcare,
Patient monitoring system, Wearable sensors.
I. INTRODUCTION
In India, main reason for rate of mortality is cardiovascular
diseases. In average 33% of persons over the age of 65 and
50% of persons over the age of 85 experience a fall each year
[1, 2]. For such people medical intervention cost is increasing
day by day. Recent advances in information and
communication technologies are expected to provide the
means to realize personalized, low cost healthcare solutions
mainly focusing on helping people. Nowadays people are
more aware about their health and are eager to participate
actively in their own health management and also healthcare
providers are looking for ways to a variety of health
information networks are being developed.
These networks seek to care providers, link hospitals,
healthcare professionals, laboratories and ultimately people’s
homes. Using available facilities one can survive from the
acute disease but this may lead to disabilities in person. Now
the question arises, how to care for individuals having
complex condition? And how to involve each individual
personally in the activity? Solution to these lies in what extent
we are taking advantage of available technologies.
Currently there are some technologies which promises
improved diagnosis and ensure participation of individual in
activity. Main aim of this paper is to discuss the available
technologies which are focused on remote health monitoring.
Advancement in wearable technologies has led to number of
biomedical application. Wearable sensors are used to gather
the data related to physical parameters as well as related to
978-1-4799-6272-3/15/$31.00(c)2015 IEEE
Swati N. Shilaskar
Electronics department
Vishwakarma Institute of Technology
Pune, Maharashtra, India
swati.shilaskar@vit.edu
patients movement. We can vary the sensor according to
clinical application of interest.
Figure shows conceptual idea of wearable sensors
Figure1.Overview of patient monitoring system
It consist of wearable materials, sensors, wireless
communication modules and links smart textiles, actuators,
power supplies, control and processing units, interfaces for the
user, software and advanced algorithms to make decision.
Wearable sensors have to follow some strict medical criteria
ergonomic constraints and significant hardware resource
limitations.
Following are some things which should have been taken into
consideration:-
Weight of wearable sensor should be small i.e. it should be
handy, When placed on body of patient it must not interfere to
user’s daily activity, It should not cause irritation on patient’s
skin, It should not cause any unwanted radiation or infection.
Also there are some technical limitations including hardware
resource constraints, most importantly processor speed,
memory availability, data storage space and power supply.
II. SURVEY BASED ON AVAILABLE SENSORS
Patient monitoring systems generally build up with following
stages:
Data collection hardware and sensing to collect physiological
and movement data, The communication hardware and
software to send data to a remote healthcare station, The data
analysis techniques to extract clinically-relevant information
from available data.
A. Variability in available sensors
1) Miniature sensors: Microcontroller based miniature
sensors play an important role in development of wearable
sensor field. Development in this miniature consist sensing
capability, amplification, microcontroller function, radio
transmission. In [3] a ring based monitoring structure is
developed to measure heart rate and blood oxygen saturation
[3].
2) System on chip implementation: there are some batch
fabrication technique because of which we can achieve
reduction in size and sensor cost. Microelectronics is based on
integration of other component like radio communication and
microprocessor in single circuit that is called as system on
chip implementation. Their system on chip includes A to D
convertor, microcontroller, generic sensor interface, a data
encoder and a frequency-shift keying radio frequency
transmitter [4]. Similarly a low-cost disposable plastic labon-
A-chip device is developed by ahn et al [5] for biochemical
detection of parameters such as glucose. This biochip contains
an inbuilt sensor array for parameter detection.
3) Textile based sensors: newly advancement in material
science is able to develop textile based systems. In textile we
can implement sensors in garment to collect data by weaving
electrode [6], [7].
There is tremendous advancement in wireless communication
field. We have to keep following things in mind.
Low cost, Small size of transmitter and receiver, Low power
consumption with development in IEEE 802.15.4/ zigbee [8].
Data transmission can be achieved using sensor network to
information gateways like pc and mobile.There are some
sensors to measure the rate of respiration also.
It uses miniaturized wearable acoustic sensor that is
microphone. Nowadays there is lots of development in
flexible circuit and integrating of sensing technology into
wearable ones.
4) Ambient sensors: These sensors avoid problem of
misplacing or damaging of wearable devices. They are used in
smart home systems for patient monitoring.
Summary of these ambient sensors is provided in various
papers associated with target user population
[9],[10],[11].Using ambient sensors we can implement some
innovative ideas for emergencies in home.
III. APPLICATIONS
Wearable sensors has tremendous applications we can divide
those applications in some categories-
Patient monitoring system, Early detection of disorder, Safety
monitoring.
A. Patient monitoring system
Nowadays population is increasing very rapidly and hence
diseases as well as healthcare cost for curing the diseases. In
some programs such as “aging in place” allows older adults
and individuals with critical disease to remain in the home
environment. And from remote places they are monitored for
safety and clinical interventions. Using available data, clinical
studies are carried out to evaluate and validate the
performance of wearable sensor over long periods of time and
improve the clinical management of patients, for instance,
with congestive heart failure [12], [13].
B. Early detection of disorder
By using artificial intelligence and some mining techniques,
we can build an early predictive system for various disorders.
Early predictions can be done for disease such as Parkinson,
Alzheimer and heart diseases. There are some wearable
devices which focus on brain injured children [14]. Again a
project called my heart is also conducted for fighting against
cardiovascular disease by early detection process [15]. It uses
smart clothes, which means the sensors are embedded directly
in clothing [16],[17].
C. Safety monitoring
Safety monitoring includes applications for detection of falls
and sending an emergency alert to a caregiver or an
emergency response team. Such devices are simple in form of
pendants or watch with a button, on pressing the button, a
wireless alarm is sent to operator in remote call centre. [18]is
focused on such wearable sensor which we can wear on chest
and it detects falls and used to monitor heart rate, skin
temperature, position in sleep and patient activity.
IV. PROPOSED SYSTEM
Brief idea of proposed system is shown in figure below,
nowadays technology is so much advance and we can do
signal processing in real time.
Figure2. Proposed system
With inbuilt smart phone sensors and using Android as an
operating system for platform development. The smart phone
processes the data and monitors the patient’s wellbeing, and in
case of an emergency, it can automatically inform the concern
physician. Fig. shows the basic design of the Patient Data
Viewer System. The design comprises components such
temperature sensor, heart beat sensor and ECG sensor for
collecting patients data, a controller for collecting data from
different equipment and sending it to a server; a server for
processing the data and communicating the details to the
Android device of the doctor. The server maintains a database
of the patient’s details.
V. CONCLUSION
This review work describes research related to the design of
an intelligent, self-adaptive and interactive wearable system
for health monitoring of people at risk available in India as
well as foreign countries. To provide deeper knowledge about
sensors some commercial systems are also introduced in this
paper. This also helped us identify the shortcomings of the
current technology, and also define new capabilities that could
be integrated in wearable sensors to improve their overall
functionality and also the quality of life. Focus is also given
on various types of sensors and their application in patient
monitoring system. The developed interfaces on both the
smart-phone and the remote workstation allow the user of the
wearable health monitoring system and the person supervising
the patient to have a complete picture of the user’s health and
to have instant access to real-time and past physiological data.
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