Wearable Belt With Built-In Textile Electrodes for Cardio—Respiratory Monitoring

Abstract

Unobtrusive and continuous monitoring of vital signs is becoming more and more important both for patient monitoring in the home environment and for sports activity tracking. Even though many gadgets and clinical systems exist, the need for simple, low-cost and easily applicable solutions still remains, especially in view of a more widespread use within everyone’s reach. The paper presents a fully wearable and wireless sensorized belt, suitable to simultaneously acquire respiratory and cardiac signals employing a single acquisition channel. The adopted method relies on a 50-kHz current injected in the subject thorax through a couple of textile electrodes and on envelope detection of the trans-thoracic voltage acquired from a couple of different embedded electrodes. The resulting signal contains both the baseband electrocardiogram (ECG) signal and the trans-thoracic impedance signal, which encodes respiratory acts. The two signals can be easily separated through suitable filtering and the cardio–respiratory rates extracted. The proposed solution yields performances comparable to those of a spirometer and a two-lead ECG. The whole system, with a realization cost below 100 €, a wireless interface, and several hours (or even days) of autonomy, is a suitable candidate for everyday use, especially if complemented by motion artifact removal techniques, currently under implementation.

A Wearable System with Embedded Conductive Textiles and an IMU for Unobtrusive Cardio-Respiratory Monitoring

“…There are several solutions for monitoring RR and HR by wearable systems; however, the state of the art of wearable systems for simultaneous monitoring of these two parameters consists only of a few works. In [ 36 , 37 ] the system was based on electrodes placed in contact with the subject’s skin to monitor both ECG and breathing-induced variations of chest wall impedance during the cyclic respiration. In [ 22 ] fiber optic sensors were used for the mentioned purpose.…”

Requirements for Supporting Diagnostic Equipment of Respiration Process in Humans

“…Recently, there has been an increase of interest in measuring human respiration monitoring, but most of the concern is focused on breathing rate, not the quantitative measurements of inhaled air [ 15 , 16 , 17 ]. Unlike in this article, published studies in this field do not separate the flow of air flowing into three channels; two nasal and one oral [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ].…”

Low Cost Non-İnvasive Portable Monitor Platform for Cardiac Biopotential and Transthoracic Impedance Measurements

“…There are also studies in the literature using current values at µA level [12,15,16]. The voltage change caused by this current is detected with a different pair of electrodes and the thoracic impedance value is obtained depending on the ohm law [2,17,18]. The thoracic impedance (Z) consists of a resistor component ranging from 15-45 Ω and an imaginary component with a phase angle of about 10 °.…”

“…There are systems that allow simultaneous acquisition of TEB signal and cardiac activity [6,12,15,16,20]. Systems that allow these signals to be obtained over a single channel are very limited [2,21]. In this study, the EVAL-ADAS1000SDZ evaluation board was used for thoracic impedance (TEB) and ECG measurement, the measurements were taken with ESP32 and transferred to RASPBERRY Pi and the results were presented to the user on the RASPBERRY Pi original screen.…”

“…Development of diagnostic techniques for early detection of cardiovascular diseases increases the survival rate [1]. In addition, the continuous and non-invasive measurement of vital signs can be an invaluable tool for physicians who can make timely decisions and make better choices when long-term patient data are available, prevent disease and reduce the costs of healthcare while improving quality of life [2,3].…”