Wearable System Based on Flexible FBG for Respiratory and Cardiac Monitoring

Respiratory monitoring is essential in sleep studies, sport training, patient monitoring, or health at work, among other applications. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of respiration sensing systems. After several systematic searches in scientific repositories, the 198 most relevant papers in this field were analyzed in detail. Different items were examined: sensing technique and sensor, respiration parameter, sensor location and size, general system setup, communication protocol, processing station, energy autonomy and power consumption, sensor validation, processing algorithm, performance evaluation, and analysis software. As a result, several trends and the remaining research challenges of respiration sensors were identified. Long-term evaluations and usability tests should be performed. Researchers designed custom experiments to validate the sensing systems, making it difficult to compare results. Therefore, another challenge is to have a common validation framework to fairly compare sensor performance. The implementation of energy-saving strategies, the incorporation of energy harvesting techniques, the calculation of volume parameters of breathing, or the effective integration of respiration sensors into clothing are other remaining research efforts. Addressing these and other challenges outlined in the paper is a required step to obtain a feasible, robust, affordable, and unobtrusive respiration sensing system.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensing Systems for Respiration Monitoring: A Technical Systematic Review

Vanegas

Igual

Plaza

2020

“…In the literature, the majority of wearables for f R monitoring used strain sensors located at the chest surface [42,[51][52][53] Only a few studies investigated the possibility of monitoring respiratory activity by using acoustic sensors in contact with the neck [54,55]. An acoustic sensor was attached to the anterior lateral base of the neck to measure the sounds coming from the flow of air in the trachea [54].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Each flexible sensor encapsulates an FBG into a rectangular shaped matrix (approximately 90 mm × 24 mm × 1 mm) made of silicone rubber (Dragon Skin TM 20; Smooth On, Inc., Macungie, PA, USA), as shown in Figure 1. The design, the manufacturing process, and the metrological properties of the flexible sensors are detailed in [42]. The working principle of the proposed system takes advantage of the FBG sensitivity to strain.…”

Section: Flexible Sensors Based On Fbgmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Two FBG sensors were encapsulated into a flexible matrix to have a robust system, and to improve the adherence of the sensing elements to the skin and the compliance with the neck movements. FBGs were chosen because of their lightweight, small size, high metrological performances, and immunity to electromagnetic interference [21,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. A pilot study on five volunteers aimed at assessing the proposed wearable system in following FE and axial rotation (AR) of the neck, and f R .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A Multi-Parametric Wearable System to Monitor Neck Movements and Respiratory Frequency of Computer Workers

Presti

Carnevale

D’Abbraccio

et al. 2020

Self Cite

Musculoskeletal disorders are the most common form of occupational ill-health. Neck pain is one of the most prevalent musculoskeletal disorders experienced by computer workers. Wrong postural habits and non-compliance of the workstation to ergonomics guidelines are the leading causes of neck pain. These factors may also alter respiratory functions. Health and safety interventions can reduce neck pain and, more generally, the symptoms of musculoskeletal disorders and reduce the consequent economic burden. In this work, a multi-parametric wearable system based on two fiber Bragg grating sensors is proposed for monitoring neck movements and breathing activity of computer workers. The sensing elements were positioned on the neck, in the frontal and sagittal planes, to monitor: (i) flexion-extension and axial rotation repetitions, and (ii) respiratory frequency. In this pilot study, five volunteers were enrolled and performed five repetitions of both flexion-extension and axial rotation, and ten breaths of both quite breathing and tachypnea. Results showed the good performances of the proposed system in monitoring the aforementioned parameters when compared to optical reference systems. The wearable system is able to well-match the trend in time of the neck movements (both flexion-extension and axial rotation) and to estimate mean and breath-by-breath respiratory frequency values with percentage errors ≤6.09% and ≤1.90%, during quiet breathing and tachypnea, respectively.

“…The remote monitoring module is able to track real time information of the physical condition as well as movements. Sensors are integrated into many types of radio wave devices such as capsules, textile and elastic bands, and are implanted or directly adhered to human skin in combination with external devices for wireless monitoring of heart rate [6][7][8], vital signs [9], blood pressure [10,11], body temperature [12], electrocardiograms [13][14][15][16][17] and so on.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increase of Input Resistance of a Normal-Mode Helical Antenna (NMHA) in Human Body Application

Zainudin

Latef

Aridas

et al. 2020

In recent years, the development of healthcare monitoring devices requires high performance and compact in-body sensor antennas. A normal-mode helical antenna (NMHA) is one of the most suitable candidates that meets the criteria, especially with the ability to achieve high efficiency when the antenna structure is in self-resonant mode. It was reported that when the antenna was placed in a human body, the antenna efficiency was decreased due to the increase of its input resistance (R in ). However, the reason for R in increase was not clarified. In this paper, the increase of R in is ensured through experiments and the physical reasons are validated through electromagnetic simulations. In the simulation, the R in is calculated by placing the NMHA inside a human's stomach, skin and fat. The dependency of R in to conductivity (σ) is significant. Through current distribution calculation, it is verified that the reason of the increase in R in is due to the decrease of antenna current. The effects of R in to bandwidth (BW) and electrical field are also numerically clarified. Furthermore, by using the fabricated human body phantom, the measured R in and bandwidth are also obtained. From the good agreement between the measured and simulated results, the condition of R in increment is clarified.