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Unobstrusive Heart Rate and Respiratory Rate Monitor Embedded on a Wheelchair

Postolache, O. ; Girão, P.M. ; Joaquim, J M ; Postolache, G.

Unobstrusive Heart Rate and Respiratory Rate Monitor Embedded on a Wheelchair, Proc IEEE International Workshop on Medical Measurements and, Cetraro, Italy, Vol. 1, pp. 1 - 6, May, 2009.

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Abstract
In this study a biomedical system embedded on a
wheelchair able to measure heart rate, respiratory rate, and the wheelchair motion state is presented. A wireless multi-channel acquisition module is connected to a BCG (balistocardiography) unit and to an inertial 3-axial MEMS accelerometer based unit.
The sensing units are embedded on the seat and backrest of the wheelchair and the acquired data is transmitted through Wi-Fi connection to a remote processing unit expressed by a laptop PC.
Considering the static and dynamic conditions of the wheelchair utilization by the user, an important part of the work was focused on BCG noise and artifacts removal as well as heart rate and respiratory rate accurate estimation from BCG signal using wavelet based filtering and ICA (Independent Component Analysis) algorithms. Experimental results for different scenarios of wheelchair utilization are included in the paper.