Audio-Conversion of Biomedical Signals - A Possible Approach to Improve Remote Monitoring of Elderly and Visually Impaired People.

Abstract

Long-term remote patients monitoring implies minimal discomfort and reliability throughout the study period. These requirements are fulfilled by portable (wearable) patient devices, with low consumption, which transmit data wirelessly, at a short distance, to a mobile communication device (GSM) and through it, to a remote end recipient - doctor, medical center or a hospital server. The data transfer technology requires the monitored person to perform a sequence of actions, such as: selecting the appropriate application on the mobile phone, establishing a connection between the patient module and the phone, recording the data in the phone's memory, starting the data transfer from the phone to the final receiver. Practice shows that often this sequence of activities is difficult for elderly people and especially for visually impaired people, which as a result compromises the remote monitoring process. In this paper are presented an approach and conceptual implementation of a system for remote monitoring of cardiac activity, using the most popular way of remote connectivity - voice (sound) communication. In addition to the ease of use, this type of communication does not require special data protection, due to the lack of RF interfaces for short-distance data transmission. The presented results of laboratory studies, as well as conducted tests under medical supervision of patients in a cardiology clinic, confirm the workability of the proposed approach for remote monitoring of patients by audio conversion of the ECG signal.