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Advances in wearable device technology pave the way for wireless health monitoring for medical and non-medical applications. In this work, we present a wearable heart rate monitoring platform communicating in the sub-6GHz 5G ISM band. The proposed device is composed of an Aluminium Nitride (AlN) piezoelectric sensor, a patch antenna, and a custom printed circuit board (PCB) for data acquisition and transmission. The experimental results show that the presented system can acquire heart rate together with diastolic and systolic duration, which are related to heart relaxation and contraction, respectively, from the posterior tibial artery. The overall system dimension is 20 mm by 40 mm, and the total weight is 20 g, making this device suitable for daily utilization. Furthermore, the system allows the simultaneous monitoring of multiple subjects, or a single patient from multiple body locations by using only one reader. The promising results demonstrate that the proposed system is applicable to the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT), and particularly Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polysomnography (PSG) remains the gold standard for sleep monitoring but is obtrusive in nature. Advances in camera sensor technology and data analysis techniques enable contactless monitoring of heart rate variability (HRV). In turn, this may allow remote assessment of sleep stages, as different HRV metrics indirectly reflect the expression of sleep stages. We evaluated a camera-based remote photoplethysmography (PPG) setup to perform automated classification of sleep stages in near darkness. Based on the contactless measurement of pulse rate variability, we use a previously developed HRV-based algorithm for 3 and 4-class sleep stage classification. Performance was evaluated on data of 46 healthy participants obtained from simultaneous overnight recording of PSG and camera-based remote PPG. To validate the results and for benchmarking purposes, the same algorithm was used to classify sleep stages based on the corresponding ECG data. Compared to manually scored PSG, the remote PPG-based algorithm achieved moderate agreement on both 3 class (Wake–N1/N2/N3–REM) and 4 class (Wake–N1/N2–N3–REM) classification, with average κ of 0.58 and 0.49 and accuracy of 81% and 68%, respectively. This is in range with other performance metrics reported on sensing technologies for wearable sleep staging, showing the potential of video-based non-contact sleep staging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Background: Cervical spinal cord injury (SCI) patients have impairment in the autonomic nervous system, reflected in the cardiovascular adaption level during the performance of upper limb (UL) activities carried out in the rehabilitation process. This adaption level could be measured from the heart rate (HR) by means of wearable technologies. Therefore, the objective was to analyze the feasibility of using Xiaomi Mi Band 5 wristband (XMB5) for HR monitoring in these patients during the performance of UL activities; (2) Methods: The HR measurements obtained from XMB5 were compared to those obtained by the professional medical equipment Nonin LifeSense II capnograph and pulse oximeter (NLII) in static and dynamic conditions. Then, four healthy people and four cervical SCI patients performed a UL training based on six experimental sessions; (3) Results: the correlation between the HR measurements from XMB5 and NLII devices was strong and positive in healthy people (r = 0.921 and r = 0.941 (p < 0.01) in the static and dynamic conditions, respectively). Then, XMB5 was used within the experimental sessions, and the HR oscillation range measured was significantly higher in healthy individuals than in patients; (4) Conclusions: The XMB5 seems to be feasible for measuring the HR in this biomedical application in SCI patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]