Autonomous Wearable System for Vital Signs Measurement With Energy-Harvesting Module

Abstract

The growing demand for wearable devices is imposed by the ability to monitor in real-time critical situations in the different areas of daily life. In many cases, power is the limiting factor for such devices. One aspect is the power supply with batteries that introduces issues due to the weight, the overall dimensions, and the disposal of the batteries. A viable solution to overcome the limitations of batteries as power source is to harvest ambient energy to power the devices directly. In this paper, a proposed wearable device with an energy harvesting module has been designed, manufactured, and tested for the measurement of vital signs. The energy-harvesting module is implemented to directly power the electronic circuit board by a flexible solar panel. This paper describes the proposed instrumented autonomous T-shirt powered by the flexible solar panel applied directly on the T-shirt. The instrumented T-shirt is capable of measuring respiration rate, heart rate, and movement of the body. The methodology adopted, the design choices, and the experimental results are clearly reported and discussed. The experimental results show the functioning even with poor outdoor lighting conditions and under specific indoor constraints.\ud Tests have been conducted aiming to compare the instrumented T-shirt’s output data with the data obtained via instruments as gold standards and to show that the overall system described in this paper is capable of producing reliable data compared with\ud the data obtained with these instruments

Wearable Device to Monitor Back Movements Using an Inductive Textile Sensor

“…The prototype presented in this paper uses a single sensor to monitor forward bending and to distinguish it from lateral bending or twisting without requiring a lengthy calibration step. It is also worth noting that while previous studies identified sliding of the clothing on the human body as one limitation that might lead to errors in detecting trunk postures [19,24], the tightfitting garment used in this study hinders sliding of the inductive sensor and helps keep the sensor in place.…”

“…From Table 3, it is observed that the present prototype is lighter than its competitors. Being lightweight is an important factor for wearable devices since it directly affects the comfort of the user [24]. Power consumption is another important feature which determines the operating life of the wearable device.…”

“…Power consumption is another important feature which determines the operating life of the wearable device. Table 3 shows that the prototype presented by Dionisi et al [24] has the lowest current consumption, which might be partially due to the solar panel placed on the user's back. However, this solution might not be effective when the user works indoors, away from sun, during long hours.…”

Combining wearable physiological and inertial sensors with indoor user localization network to enhance activity recognition

“…User location In-home Out-of-home Dionisi et al [8] x x Pärkkä et al [32] x x Lara et al [24] x x Reddy et al [34] x x Di Francesco et al [7] x Zhu et al [51] x x Wang et al [48] x Sharma et al [37] x Filippoupolitis et al [13] x x Ishimaru et al [19] x…”

Improving Photoplethysmographic Measurements Under Motion Artifacts Using Artificial Neural Network for Personal Healthcare

“…are playing key roles in the development of such personal healthcare systems [14]. An important aspect of such personalized healthcare is power consumption optimization using energy harvesting technology [15].…”