On the way to a cable free operating theater: An operating table with integrated multimodal monitoring

On the way to a cable free operating theater a new operating table is developed featuring into the table integrated sensors for patient monitoring, which do not necessarily need a direct contact to the naked skin, and a magnetic tracking system. The patient monitoring sensors are new multimodal sensors, which combine a capacitive electric field sensor with a reflective optical sensor and a temperature measurement. This multimodal measurement offers the opportunity of a reliable vital sign measurement by use of redundancy and plausibility checks. A novel artifact detection method for capacitive electrocardiogram measurements based on an optical measurement is presented. Together with an adaptive threshold based algorithm, intervals with artifacts can reliably be identified resulting in a robust estimation of heart rate.