Commodity Sensors, Physiological Signals, Research Opportunities, and Practical Issues

Abstract

We discuss selected emerging technologies in physiological signal processing, low-cost pervasive sensors, diagnostic pattern recognition, and some research issues they entail. Serious practical issues remain for signal acquisition from users in their own environments using these commodity sensors. To illustrate the technical issues, we describe a novel robust processing algorithm for mobile ECG sensors (i.e. non-contact capacitive sensors with low signal-to-noise ratios). We describe the detection techniques designed to function effectively with such noisy ECG data.