Abstract:
As of date patient monitoring systems range from fetal monitoring systems to aged care monitoring systems and all differ in terms of mobility, topology, being wired, partially wireless and fully wireless, power consumption, monitoring an epoc in time to continuous monitoring systems. Patient monitoring systems for patients with long-term conditions (SCI, stroke, severe cardio and respiratory diseases) are normally monitored remotely however most systems developed and complexities identified by literature are limited to partially wireless systems that are connected to the local PSTN network.
SCI patients usually receive this life changing trauma between ages 16 to 30 are mostly healthy and have no prior medical conditions. Contrary to other long-term conditions, these patients are mobile however unable to perform vigorous exercise. This research will look into monitoring systems capable of monitoring the performance of these sufferers over a long period of time. Performance is defined as the measure of increase or decrease in heart rate, breathing, temperature, blood pressure and anomalies in these vital signs in relation with degree in motion of the SCI patient. It is predicted that there would be a relation to how the body will feedback these signals and anomalies to the level of inactivity or lack of vigorous exercise.
Autonomic Dysreflexia (Bad-Reflex) is a life threatening syndrome and injuries above T6 makes a patient susceptible. Complexities arise when trying to detect the onset of this syndrome when the patient is not at rest and will be addressed in this research. This research will also focus on the complexities involved in long-term, fully wireless, non-diagnostic monitoring of these patients based upon the MULLE project spearheaded by collaborators from Lulea Institute of Technology. This embedded systems has been modified from its initial use as an intelligent sensor network node to being a bridge of both short range Bluetooth connectivity and long range cellular packet switching networks which can range from UMTS,EDGE GPRS to other emerging protocols.
About the Speaker
Graduated from Monash University Australia in Electrical and Computer Systems engineering and extensive experience in developing telemetry systems. These systems include a Prosthetic Limb Monitoring system that continuously measures loads in a limb and the ability to measure instantaneous load at heel strike using a GFSK radio in embedded devices. Research interest includes optimising power and data efficiencies by time interleaving event-dependent sampling rates. Previously worked in Freescale Semiconductors in developing depassivation techniques for PowerPC G4, HC12 and HC08 processors a method still used as of date. Has written a paper submitted to IASTED conference and currently working on a paper outlining effective ECG anomaly detector for embedded devices using second order derivation to solve drifting baseline signals.
