A Systematic Review of Wearable Patient Monitoring Systems - Current Challenges and Opportunities for Clinical Adoption

The aim of this review is to investigate barriers and challenges of wearable patient monitoring (WPM) solutions adopted by clinicians in acute, as well as in community, care settings. Currently, healthcare providers are coping with ever-growing healthcare challenges including an ageing population, chronic diseases, the cost of hospitalization, and the risk of medical errors. WPM systems are a potential solution for addressing some of these challenges by enabling advanced sensors, wearable technology, and secure and effective communication platforms between the clinicians and patients. A total of 791 articles were screened and 20 were selected for this review. The most common publication venue was conference proceedings (13, 54%). This review only considered recent studies published between 2015 and 2017. The identified studies involved chronic conditions (6, 30%), rehabilitation (7, 35%), cardiovascular diseases (4, 20%), falls (2, 10%) and mental health (1, 5%). Most studies focussed on the system aspects of WPM solutions including advanced sensors, wireless data collection, communication platform and clinical usability based on a specific area or disease. The current studies are progressing with localized sensor-software integration to solve a specific use-case/health area using non-scalable and 'silo' solutions. There is further work required regarding interoperability and clinical acceptance challenges. The advancement of wearable technology and possibilities of using machine learning and artificial intelligence in healthcare is a concept that has been investigated by many studies. We believe future patient monitoring and medical treatments will build upon efficient and affordable solutions of wearable technology.

Intelligent classification of heartbeats for automated real-time ECG monitoring

BACKGROUND

The automatic interpretation of electrocardiography (ECG) data can provide continuous analysis of heart activity, allowing the effective use of wireless devices such as the Holter monitor.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We propose an intelligent heartbeat monitoring system to detect the possibility of arrhythmia in real time. We detected heartbeats and extracted features such as the QRS complex and P wave from ECG signals using the Pan-Tompkins algorithm, and the heartbeats were then classified into 16 types using a decision tree.

RESULTS

We tested the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of our system against data from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. Our system achieved an average accuracy of 97% in heartbeat detection and an average heartbeat classification accuracy of above 96%, which is comparable with the best competing schemes.

CONCLUSIONS

This work provides a guide to the systematic design of an intelligent classification system for decision support in Holter ECG monitoring.

WE-CARE: an intelligent mobile telecardiology system to enable mHealth applications

Recently, cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become one of the leading death causes worldwide, and it contributes to 41% of all deaths each year in China. This disease incurs a cost of more than 400 billion US dollars in China on the healthcare expenditures and lost productivity during the past ten years. It has been shown that the CVD can be effectively prevented by an interdisciplinary approach that leverages the technology development in both IT and electrocardiogram (ECG) fields. In this paper, we present WE-CARE , an intelligent telecardiology system using mobile 7-lead ECG devices. Because of its improved mobility result from wearable and mobile ECG devices, the WE-CARE system has a wider variety of applications than existing resting ECG systems that reside in hospitals. Meanwhile, it meets the requirement of dynamic ECG systems for mobile users in terms of the detection accuracy and latency. We carried out clinical trials by deploying the WE-CARE systems at Peking University Hospital. The clinical results clearly showed that our solution achieves a high detection rate of over 95% against common types of anomalies in ECG, while it only incurs a small detection latency around one second, both of which meet the criteria of real-time medical diagnosis. As demonstrated by the clinical results, the WE-CARE system is a useful and efficient mHealth (mobile health) tool for the cardiovascular disease diagnosis and treatment in medical platforms.

An adaptive framework for real-time ECG transmission in mobile environments

Wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring involves the measurement of ECG signals and their timely transmission over wireless networks to remote healthcare professionals. However, fluctuations in wireless channel conditions pose quality-of-service challenges for real-time ECG monitoring services in a mobile environment. We present an adaptive framework for layered coding and transmission of ECG data that can cope with a time-varying wireless channel. The ECG is segmented into layers with differing importance with respect to the quality of the reconstructed signal. According to this observation, we have devised a simple and efficient real-time scheduling algorithm based on the earliest deadline first (EDF) policy, which decides the order of transmitting or retransmitting packets that contain ECG data at any given time for the delivery of scalable ECG data over a lossy channel. The algorithm takes into account the differing priorities of packets in each layer, which prevents the perceived quality of the reconstructed ECG signal from degrading abruptly as channel conditions worsen, while using the available bandwidth efficiently. Extensive simulations demonstrate this improvement in perceived quality.

Design and QoS of a wireless system for real-time remote electrocardiography

Quality of service (QoS) and, in particular, reliability and a bounded low latency are essential attributes of safety-critical wireless systems for medical applications. However, wireless links are typically prone to bursts of errors, with characteristics which vary over time.We propose a wireless system suitable for real-time remote patient monitoring in which the necessary reliability and guaranteed latency are both achieved by an efficient error control scheme. We have paired an example remote electrocardiography application to this wireless system. We also developed a tool chain that uses a formal description of the proposed wireless medical system architecture in the architecture analysis and design language to assess various combinations of system parameters: we can determine the QoS in terms of packet-delivery ratio and the service latency, and also the size of jitter buffer required for seamless ECG monitoring. A realistic assessment, based on data from the MIT-BIT arrhythmia database, shows that the proposed wireless system can achieve an appropriate level of QoS for real-time ECG monitoring if link-level error control is correctly implemented. Additionally, we present guidelines for the design of energy-efficient link-level error control, derived from energy data, obtained from simulations.

Predictable and reliable ECG monitoring over IEEE 802.11 WLANs within a hospital

Telecardiology provides mobility for patients who require constant electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring. However, its safety is dependent on the predictability and robustness of data delivery, which must overcome errors in the wireless channel through which the ECG data are transmitted. We report here a framework that can be used to gauge the applicability of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) technology to ECG monitoring systems in terms of delay constraints and transmission reliability. For this purpose, a medical-grade WLAN architecture achieved predictable delay through the combination of a medium access control mechanism based on the point coordination function provided by IEEE 802.11 and an error control scheme based on Reed-Solomon coding and block interleaving. The size of the jitter buffer needed was determined by this architecture to avoid service dropout caused by buffer underrun, through analysis of variations in transmission delay. Finally, we assessed this architecture in terms of service latency and reliability by modeling the transmission of uncompressed two-lead electrocardiogram data from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database and highlight the applicability of this wireless technology to telecardiology.

An awareness approach to analyze ECG streaming data

Real-time remote health monitoring systems are experiencing tremendous advancement resulting from improvements in low power, reliable sensors; yet they are still constrained to low-level interpretation. Automatic data analysis continues to be a tedious task due to a lack of efficient, reliable platforms for data analysis. In this paper, we present a system for monitoring patients remotely by emphasizing the strength of Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Situation Awareness. In this approach, the system makes decisions in a declarative way, which helps medical experts to understand the situation in a more realistic manner. The primary objective of this paper is to explicate the different components inside the system. To verify the technical feasibility of each component, the proposed system is implemented and tested using ECG data.