Applying mobile phone technology for making health and rehabilitation monitoring more affordable

Nowadays, stationary clinical patient monitoring is achieved with professional, but very expensive devices, which are well established and commonly used. Also mobile monitoring is possible through devices from the same vendors of medical instruments, for instance during diagnosis and rehabilitation. A look on the sports consumer market shows that there are similar devices and systems available. For instance, heart rate monitoring with warning signals can be achieved at a much lower price with such devices quite easily. Furthermore, the versatile sensors, which are available today as sports equipment, can be linked through an open RF communication standard to other computing units, in particular to smartphones, which meanwhile also implement this new protocol. In this work, the possibilities and capabilities of such semi-professional device approaches are discussed. Scenarios like health and rehabilitation activities are under major scope in this comparative evaluation. The argumentation as also the derived concepts are complemented by experiments on the behavior and reliability of such sports sensors.