Medical device alarms.

The high number of false positive alarms has long been known to be a serious problem in critical care medicine - yet it remains unresolved. At the same time, threats to patient safety due to missing or suppressed alarms are being reported. The purpose of this paper is to present results from a workshop titled "Too many alarms? Too few alarms?" organized by the Section Patient Monitoring and the Workgroup Alarms of the German Association of Biomedical Engineering of the Association for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies.

The pulse arrival time approach for non-invasive hemodynamic monitoring in low-acuity settings.

Background: Hemodynamic monitoring in hospitalized patients is crucial since in clinical practice unexpected deterioration of cardiovascular function (e.g. pulmonary embolism resulting in syncope) remains a serious problem and an important cause of death.

Motion tolerance in wearable sensors--the challenge of motion artifact.

Motion artifact is a major limitation in most practical implementations of wearable health monitoring devices. Especially in applications requiring continuous monitoring and high specificity, motion artifact can render a solution not feasible in real world use cases. We believe that the single most important technical challenge that will decide the success of wearable biomedical sensor systems is signal integrity.

A comparison of continuous wave Doppler radar to impedance cardiography for analysis of mechanical heart activity.

The paper compares the data obtained from a continuous wave Doppler radar sensor based on a commercially available microwave motion sensor KMY24 to an impedance cardiograph measured using a Cardiac Output Monitor (Medis Niccomo). Both sensors are used to analyze the mechanical activity of the heart. System parameters, signal content and robustness are discussed.

Dry electrodes for monitoring of vital signs in functional textiles.

Wearable electronics may become a key element in the future to measure a patient's physiological parameters not only in a clinical environment. This work describes dry electrodes based on conductive rubber, which can be integrated into clothing for monitoring purposes. Characteristic electrical properties like warm up time, skin-electrode impedance and motion artefacts will be discussed.