A WIRELESS SENSOR SYSTEM AND APPLICATIONS OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE PULSE DIAGNOSIS FOR INDIVIDUAL HEALTHCARE MONITORING

Abstract

<p>Home health care continues to be an important and challenging issue in most countries, especially for the elderly. To improve home health care, it would be useful to have wireless biomedical systems that can monitor various vital signs ofthe elderly and to provide such information to a health care professional. In the orient, one powerful tool in diagnosing and predicting health issues is the Traditional Chinese Pulse Diagnosis (TCPD) technique. The TCPD technique is through the examination ofthe artery pulse pattern on three points along the radial artery and it usually requires a doctor to conduct pulse palpation with their fingers. Therefore, the diagnosis relies significantly on the experience of the doctor. However, for the more widespread use of TCPD, one concept is to bring the doctor's "fingers" and "encode" the doctor's experience to an individual in a home care setting. Using existing technologies in biomedical sensor, data acquisition, communication and microelectronics, it is possible to construct a "smart" TCPD system.</p> <p>In this thesis, a microcontroller based pulse monitoring system for TCPD's application in home care is proposed. The system consists of three main units for data acquisition, data processing and wireless transmission. The pulse data acquisition is with a liquid-filled digital pressure sensor module with the employment of applanation tonometry, a technique used in recording the peripheral artery waveform. Each sensor module is read by a corresponding microcontroller via its serial peripheral interface, and the measurement is then sent wirelessly to a personal computer (PC) via a 204GHz transceiver. The system was used to successfully record and transmit radial pulse pressure and body surface temperature measurements to a host PC. Pulse waveforms are then reproduced from the pulse pressure measurements to conduct offline analysis. The analysis is targeted to integrating TCPD diagnosis with quantitative pulse representation and measurement history, to use expert knowledge in classification and recognition, and therefore to provide supporting information for disease diagnosis and forecasting.</p> <p>The work performed in this thesis presents the proof-of-concept research and system implementation in the design of an individual health monitoring system using the TCPD method. Basic pattern matching and parameter extraction/comparison are performed and verified. Finally, the research work presented here provides a solid foundation for future work in this field ofTCPD and its application.</p>