An m-Health system for education and motivation in cardiac rehabilitation: the experience of HeartCycle guided exercise.

Introduction Home-based programmes for cardiac rehabilitation play a key role in the recovery of patients with coronary artery disease. However, their necessary educational and motivational components have been rarely implemented with the help of modern mobile technologies. We developed a mobile health system designed for motivating patients to adhere to their rehabilitation programme by providing exercise monitoring, guidance, motivational feedback, and educational content.

Internet-based training of coronary artery patients: the Heart Cycle Trial.

Low adherence to cardiac rehabilitation (CR) might be improved by remote monitoring systems that can be used to motivate and supervise patients and tailor CR safely and effectively to their needs. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of a smartphone-guided training system (GEX) and whether it could improve exercise capacity compared to CR delivered by conventional methods for patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). A prospective, randomized, international, multi-center study comparing CR delivered by conventional means (CG) or by remote monitoring (IG) using a new training steering/feedback tool (GEx System).

Evaluation of a newly designed shirt-based ECG and breathing sensor for home-based training as part of cardiac rehabilitation for coronary artery disease.

Background: Participation in phase-III cardiac rehabilitation (CR) remains low but adherence could potentially be improved with supervised home-based CR. New technological approaches are needed to provide sufficient supervision with respect to safety and performance of individual exercise programmes.

Design: The newly designed closed-loop tool, HeartCycle's guided exercise (GEX) system, will support professionals and patients during exercise-based CR.

BIOTEX--biosensing textiles for personalised healthcare management.

Textile-based sensors offer an unobtrusive method of continually monitoring physiological parameters during daily activities. Chemical analysis of body fluids, noninvasively, is a novel and exciting area of personalized wearable healthcare systems. BIOTEX was an EU-funded project that aimed to develop textile sensors to measure physiological parameters and the chemical composition of body fluids, with a particular interest in sweat.

Continuous monitoring of coordinated cardiovascular responses.

The continuous separate monitoring of cardiac and vascular functions provide important insights on cardiovascular regulation. In the last years several attempts have failed at demonstrating the feasibility of using Pulse Wave Velocity as a surrogate indicator of arterial blood pressure. Upon the hypothesis that the cause of PWV unreliability is vasomotor activity, in this paper we develop an extended model of lumped arterial tree that copes with changes in vessels diameter.

Getting rid of the wires and connectors in physiological monitoring.

One of the main limitations towards an easy-touse, comfortable, and reliable product for physiological monitoring comes from wires and associated connectors. Wireless solutions for data transmission are more and more common in every domain, but for biopotential and impedance measurements, at least one galvanic line will always be needed. This paper describes a new technology that can make possible the measurement of biopotentials and body impedances with high quality standard using only one wire.

Smart garments for safety improvement of emergency/disaster operators.

The main purpose of the European project ProeTEX is to develop equipment to improve safety, coordination and efficiency of emergency disaster intervention personnel like fire-fighters or civil protection rescuers. The equipment consists of a new generation of "smart" garments, integrating wearable sensors which will allow monitoring physiological parameters, position and activity of the user, as like as environmental variables of the operating field in which rescuers are working: both commercial and newly developed textile and fibre based sensors will be included. The garments will also contain an electronic box to process data collected by the sensors and a communication system enabling the transmission of data to the other rescuers and to a monitoring station.

On-body diagnosis for wearable systems serving biomedical needs.

Early diagnosis as well as a healthy and preventive lifestyle can help slowing the onset of many health problems and save millions of lives per year. To achieve this objective, long-term monitoring of human vital signs are required to obtain knowledge on a person's health status. Continuous monitoring of vital signs is mandatory, but continuous transmission is expensive, in terms of financial costs as well as power consumption for battery operated portable systems.

Homecare: a telemedical application.

The advent of telecommunication and information technologies and the miniaturisation of technologies have enabled the evolution of telemonitoring systems. Early systems for hospitals and clinics, which usually required the patients to be wired to desktop devices, have evolved into homecare that requires devices to be lighter and simpler to use. In addition to miniaturisation and extended autonomy, further requirements for the telemonitoring system include local intelligence (that is, the system can take decisions without referring to external advice) and no moving parts to allow the patient to move freely during measurement periods.