Research & Design On Wearable Pre-warning System For Remote Health Monitoring

With the rapid development of wearable microelectronics, radio communication, remote monitoring, weak signal detection and material science, the wearable healthcare system(WHS), which integrates a variety of microsensors, a wireless communication module and a micro control unit and which can be used in the home or in community environment, has become a hot topic of research all over the world. The WHS can be comfortably worn on the user’s body, without any disturbance to his daily life and normal work. It can monitor multiple physiological parameters including pulse rate, respiratory rate, pulse oxygen saturation and 24-hour dynamic electrocardiogram, display these parameters on smart terminals and provide early warning of falling for the elderly. Therefore, it is of great importance to promote people’s health level.In this paper, we adopt the modular design method, propose and implement a new type of wearable device for early warning of falling for the elderly. This device integrates multiple algorithms of physiological abnormalities evaluation and the early warning mechanisms of falling based on posture detection, in order for multi-modal monitoring of the elderly in various circumstances. It is composed of a wearable watch terminal node(WWTN) on MSP430, a coordinated control node(CCN) on STM32 and the System Software(SS) on VC++6.0. It can collect the electrocardiogram(ECG), the photoplethysmography(PPG), the respiratory signal(RESP) and the body posture(BP) in real time. After conditioning and analog-to-digital conversion, these signals are assembled on a signal processing platform based on MSP430, packaged into fixed format for serial transport, and wirelessly transmitted via a low-power bluetooth(bluetooth low energy, BLE) from WWTN to CCN. After received by CCN, these data are decoded and filtered, displayed on an OLED screen and stored in a SD card. In addition, these physiological parameters and body posture data were further transmitted to a remote medical data server via WiFi, RS232 or a network interface module ENC28J60, for storage, management and cloud computing. In the present study, we implemented the software on the PC in VC++ language. The database and server software will be further developed in the near future.After performance test and falling simulation on this system, the results showed that the WHS could continuously monitor the ECG, RESP, PPG and SPO2, and that it could trigger warnings once abnormal parameters or falling events were detected. Compared with similar portable products, the WHS has the advantages of high anti-interference, low noise, high accuracy and effective recognition of abnormal parameters and falling events. It has great theoretical value and practical significance due to its wearable, real-time, accurate and intelligent characteristics.