WECARMON · Wearable Cardiorespiratory Monitor

Wearable Cardiorespiratory Monitor

The WECARMON’s main objective is to develop a novel system for monitoring patients suffering of cardiorespiratory diseases. It is based on a very comfortable wearable armband which can monitor some cardiorespiratory parameters during the patients’ normal life. Its innovative nature is based on two main tools: 1) a long-term (months) wearable ECG device which uses dry electrodes which causes no skin irritation and which are placed in a leadless armband, and 2) signal processing techniques for estimating respiratory rate and volumes from ECG which are robust against artefacts generated by movements during daily life. Among the wide range of applications that a long-term cardiorespiratory monitor has (including monitoring of sleep, stress level, fitness level, and chronic respiratory patients), WECARMON is focused on the monitoring of chronic respiratory patients. An (OSAS) screening based on such a comfortable and wearable device would be an excellent alternative to the polysomnography (quite involved and difficult to use in ambulatory scenario), being more comfortable for the patient and economic for the society. Furthermore, depending on the results obtained when evaluating the armband device for OSAS screening, we could think of monitoring the patient during some weeks in order to assess the effectiveness of the treatment and to adapt it in case it is needed. Other patients whose monitoring is interesting are COPD and/or asthma patients. These patients are affected by destabilizations (or “exacerbations”) which makes them to seek medical help and often lead to their hospitalization. Exacerbations can start quickly (in minutes to hours) and they are one of the main causes of mortality among patients with COPD and asthma which are the two most common chronic respiratory diseases, affecting millions of children and adults. The wearable armband may allow us to early detect COPD/asthma exacerbations and lead to a better prognosis of the patient and a reduction of financial costs to society. The wearable armband provided good quality ECG data during more than a half of the non-bedtime, and during almost all the bedtime, and respiratory rate was successfully estimated from the armband-ECG signals by using a ECG-derived-respiration (EDR) methods. In addition, the amplitudes of these EDR signals showed a correlation with the tidal volume higher than 0.9 (inter-subject median), suggesting that the armband can track not only respiratory rate, but also changes in tidal volume. These results are promising and allow us to consider the armband ECG device as a potential wearable cardiorespiratory monitor. The coronavirus disease pandemic made the contact-requiring experiments not recommendable, specially for respiratory patients. WECARMON project was redirected to early detection of SARS-COV-2 infection based on same physiological information that was planned to be used for patients monitoring. A new objective was set: the development of a smartphone application for obtaining this physiological information by using a pulse photoplethysmographic (PPG) signal recorded by the camera and flashlight. An Android application that records that PPG and stores it in “the cloud” (once anonymized) was created, and a visual inspection revealed that the signals have enough quality to obtain the desired physiological information. The application is currently being validated.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз