Application of a Wearable Physiological Monitoring System in Pulmonary Respiratory Rehabilitation Research

Pulmonary rehabilitation has been demonstrated as a highly effective and safe treatment for improving health-related quality of life and reducing hospital admissions mortality in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. Despite significant progress within the physiological monitoring device industry, the widespread integration of wearable systems into medical practice remains limited. In this paper, we present a medical-grade wearable multi-sensor system to acquire COPD patients' vital signs and assist in pulmonary respiratory rehabilitation. Currently, 4 areas in this field were explored: breathing pattern analysis, respiratory exercises training, six minute walk test and inpatient 24-hours physiological monitoring. Totally 130 subjects enrolled in this study. The results show that this system can acquire cardiopulmonary physiological signals unobtrusively and accurately, and provide useful information for pulmonary respiratory rehabilitation. The next step for this work is to collect more physiological data from COPD patients during respiratory training exercises and generate individualized guideline and therapy for pulmonary respiratory rehabilitation.