Intelligent health monitoring system based on smart clothing

In this study, we proposed an intelligent health monitoring system based on smart clothing. The system consisted of smart clothing and sensing component, care institution control platform, and mobile device. The smart clothing is a wearable device for electrocardiography signal collection and heart rate monitoring. The system integrated our proposed fast empirical mode decomposition algorithm for electrocardiography denoising and hidden Markov model–based algorithm for fall detection. Eight kinds of services were provided by the system, including surveillance of signs of life, tracking of physiological functions, monitoring of the activity field, anti-lost, fall detection, emergency call for help, device wearing detection, and device low battery warning. The performance of fast empirical mode decomposition and hidden Markov model were evaluated by experiment I (fast empirical mode decomposition evaluation) and experiment II (fall detection), respectively. The accuracy and sensitivity of R -peak detection using fast empirical mode decomposition were 96.46% and 98.75%, respectively. The accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of fall detection using hidden Markov model were 97.92%, 90.00%, and 99.50%, respectively. The system was evaluated in an elderly long-term care institution in Taiwan. The results of the satisfaction survey showed that both the caregivers and the elders are willing to use the proposed intelligent health monitoring system. The proposed system may be used for long-term health monitoring.