Introduction: Registration of biomedical signals is often vital in diagnosis and clinical monitoring of patients. This procedure is mainly done in hospital environment, following specific protocol and limited to a short period of time. Thus, it is crucial develop a modular system that can be used out of clinical environment in the day-life context to record biomedical signals.
Objectives: In this communication we propose a modular, portable and low cost system to accurately measure and record multiple biomedical signals.
Methods: The prototype is based on a general-purpose microcontroller associated with an accelerometer, which permits to detect and record patient activity and position. The system also has an interface to record events. All this information is stored in a standard memory card, in a format that allows subsequent reading and analysis by several software applications, such as Excel, Access and Matlab. The healthcare professional can set the signals to be acquired, the time interval during which they intend to carry out the respective registration and the sampling rate.
Results: The prototype was tested during 24 hours. In this period, the heart rate, body temperature, as well as, the patient activity and position were recorded, with a one minute interval between samples. The stored information allowed a subsequently and appropriately analysis of the temporal evolution of the recorded signals.
Conclusions: The ability of our portable prototype to record continuously various biomedical signals and the information of patient’s activity and position makes it an important tool in the diagnosis of different pathologies.