Overview
When elderly people or high-risk patients can stay at home long before hospitalization (or soon after the hospitalization), an important contribution to the reduction of public health cost and to the life quality of the patients can be achieved. Hence, health monitoring is among the most attractive application fields for wearable electronics and has been studied by many research groups. A variety of wearable devices for monitoring physiological parameters are already commercially available today with many others in research and development stage. However, the majority of such devices is aimed at the recreational market (e.g. joggers) and is not suitable for medical monitoring of high-risk or elderly patients. Those devices that have been qualified for medical use are usually fairly simple measuring just a few parameters and providing little or no online analysis.
The SmartCuff project comprises the design of a wearable medical device that continuously and non-invasively measures several vital parameters in order to provide complete patient information, which is particularly targeted to monitor the health of elderly people while they are comfortably staying at home.
The SmartCuff project will achieve these goals thanks to a specifically developed sensing microchip, innovative sensor fusion algorithms and comfortable capacitive contact electrodes.
