Wearable wireless sensors for chronic respiratory disease monitoring

Abstract

We present a wearable sensor system consisting of a wristband and chest patch to enable the correlation of individual environmental exposure to health response for understanding impacts of ozone on chronic asthma conditions. The wrist worn device measures ambient ozone concentration, heart rate via plethysmography (PPG), three-axis acceleration, ambient temperature, and ambient relative humidity. The chest patch measures heart rate via electrocardiography (ECG) and PPG, respiratory rate via PPG, wheezing via a microphone, and three-axis acceleration. The data from each sensor is continually streamed to a peripheral data aggregation device, and is subsequently transferred to a dedicated server for cloud storage. The current generation of the system uses only commercially-off-the-shelf (COTS) components where the entire electronic structure of the wristband has dimensions of 3.1×4.1×1.2 cm3 while the chest patch electronics has a dimensions of 3.3×4.4×1.2 cm3. The power consumptions of the wristband and chest patch are 78 mW and 33 mW respectively where using a 400 mAh lithium polymer battery would operate the wristband for around 15 hours and the chest patch for around 36 hours.