A Long-term Wearable Vital Signs Monitoring System using BSN

Wearable medical devices provide great convenience to the elderly for the monitoring of vital signs at home. This paper describes a novel long-term wearable vital signs monitoring system which can real-time measure physiological signs such as ECG, SpO₂ (saturation of arterial oxygen) and systolic blood pressure. The proposed device is easy to wear, convenient to use and has almost no impact on the quality of life. A miniaturized PCB integrated with the ECG analog front-end and SpO₂ LED drive circuit is attached onto the BSN node. By simply wearing the chest band embedded with ECG micromachined electrodes and the ear-probe which incorporates LEDs and photodetector, the measured physiological signals can be wirelessly transmitted to a hand-held device, such as PDA phone, where the heart beat rate, SpO₂ and systolic blood pressure are calculated and displayed.