Wearable Heart Monitor

Increased awareness of healthy living is pushing the development of wearable devices side by side with rapidly advancing processing ability and sensor technology. Smartwatches with biomonitoring are becoming ubiquitous but are not meant for clinical monitoring. In the future outpatient care could benefit from easily applied wearable monitoring systems that could communicate with a smartphone and give reports.In this project ways of wearable heart monitoring at rest with an accelerometer were investigated. A commercially available development kit (CC1350 Sensortag) with its built-in sensors was used. After exploring the fields of ballisto-, seismo-, and phonocardiography it was decided to use seismocardiographic readings with the accelerometer. For that purpose ways of filtering and data processing were explored, first in MATLAB and then with chosen methods in real-time monitoring. A heart rate sensing program was implemented. Data logging option through UART was implemented and communication through Bluetooth was investigated for future work. Experiments with simultaneous electrocardiograms and accelerometers were made on a subject in different orientations. In these experiments, the results were positive. The visual identification of significant left heart events was made, including peaks considered to represent aortic and mitral valve function. Analyses of seismocardiogram signals could add to diagnostic accuracy of certain heart disease.