VitalSticker: A novel multimodal physiological wearable patch device for health monitoring

Wearable Health Devices (WHDs) are increasingly becoming an integral part of daily life and significantly contributing to self-monitoring in healthcare. WHDs have a wide range of applications, ranging from sports to clinical settings, where the monitoring of cardiovascular health, particularly through ECG, plays a crucial role. This study introduces a unique WHD called VitalSticker, which exhibits distinctive features such as having a comfortable tiny patch form-factor to be attached to the chest, collecting multiple vital signs with medical-grade quality (ECG, respiration, temperature and actigraphy) and seamlessly sending data to a companion app. This paper encompasses a detailed description of the hardware, firmware, and case design of the WHD. A study was conducted to assess the quality of the ECG signal acquired by VitalSticker, comparing it with the signal obtained from a CE medical-grade certified ambulatory device. The results demonstrate that our VitalSticker achieves similar medical-grade quality when compared to the reference device, surpassing its counterpart in several specifications. Furthermore, this study presents the successful implementation of an ECG baseline wander correction filter that runs on the tiny on-board wearable microcontroller without introducing any artifacts into the ECG signal, reducing the need for further processing for this outside the wearable patch.