engleski

Home Health Monitoring

Home health monitoring can help the national health care be-come more effective, cheaper for the society and guarantee better quality of life for individuals. Especially those living alone can get a user-friendly supervision. For elderly patients this technique guarantees a regular medical check including alerting of relevant health care service and/or in case of need, informing their relatives living apart. The aim of medical diagnostics is to obtain specific and sensitive diagnostic results at the earliest possible stage of illness with a minimally invasive procedure for the patient. This is often related to preventive diagnostic proce-dures performed at home, especially in the part of population at health risk, such as elderly people or children. Though many devices have been developed recently for home monitoring, there is still a need for development of specialized devices covering specific physiological parameters, as well as for improvement of performance of devices present at the market. In this paper, we focus on high blood pressure and pulmonary pathologies, which are both symptoms common among population with chronic diseases. Therefore, there is a need for continuous research of new and better measurement methods and development of intelligent instrumentation for home health monitoring of physiological parameters related to these symp-toms. Our development includes non-invasive blood-pressure and respiration instrumentation for home health monitoring. Measuring blood-pressure is of vital importance in home health monitoring. The majority of blood-pressure meters available for home use on the market apply the oscillometric method. The accuracy of these devices is limited, especially when applied to patients with cardiovascular diseases. The method we developed assures better accuracy and even warns the tested persons if they are not in the resting status necessary for the measurement. The system for respiratory sound analysis we developed is based on Fast Fourier Transform computation and a robust algorithm for wheeze detection in the sound spectra. This system is intended for long-term monitoring and early stage assessment of asthma episodes, especially in children.

home health; monitoring; blodd pressure

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