Innovations in Biomedicine: Measuring Physiological Parameters Becomes As Simple As Applying A Plaster on the Body

Abstract

Electromagnetic applications play an essential role in medical research. As a response to the consistent increase in the number of people suffering from various diseases, the medical research is always looking for better diagnostic tools, expedited information transfer technologies, accurate prognosis devices, efficient patient management system and other alternative medicine strategies. In this context, the H2020 Project SINTEC proposes a soft intelligent epidermal communication platform where two main innovations are integrated: soft epidermal electronics and the intra-body communication based on fat tissue as a transmission channel. This proposed platform will host miniaturized, conformal and flexible sensing and data transfer technologies to enable real-time monitoring of certain vital parameters at any time (while doing sport, sleeping or watching television without having to go to a health specialized facility and/or using different devices such as a pulse oximetry, heart rate monitor and thermometer). As part of the phantom development, empirical models relating bioimpedance signals to other physiological signals (ECG, SpO2, Blood Pressure, etc.) is being studied and will be used to optimize phantom-based demonstrators as close as possible to human subjects. To this end, proper characterization of bioimpedance signals in different human subjects is crucial to devise such empirical models. This work presents preliminary results in four human volunteers, with different weight, gender and age, using two types of electrodes configurations. These results show that bioimpedance signals correlate well with volunteer s metadata as predicted by previous works. Finally, the communication through the FAT-channel and also comparisons with the traditional Freespace BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) protocol will be demonstrated.