Body Area Network Synchronization for Pulse Transit Time Estimation

The evolution of demographic dynamics and the variation in the health needs of the population require an organizational redesign services network. Since growing number of elderly and chronic diseases, it needs to provide increasingly advanced devices, able to monitor patients constantly, without hinder or limit their normal lifestyle. Chronic diseases are becoming the most common cause of disability and death. A chronic disorder is a psychological or physical health condition that causes functional restrictions with a negative impact on the quality of life. Examples include hypertension, cancer, stroke, diabetes, respiratory diseases, arthritis, heart and oral disease. Hypertension plays an influential role in this area and in the formation of ischemic heart and cerebrovascular disease, like renal and cardiac failure. Treating hypertension allows to reduce the 40% of the stroke and the 15% of the possibility of heart attacks. Even if there are different strategies for treating the problem of hypertension, which aim to prevent cardiovascular disease (CVD), hypertension remains a problem which does not improve the quality of life. For this reason, in recent decades, biomedical engineering has encouraged the development of simple and reliable devices. Great interest has been shown in wearable systems to monitor the risk of acute events. By continuously monitoring, wearable devices allow to detect chronic diseases characterised by large latency. These devices permit over longer periods of time, several weeks or months, to monitor patients: detects signals, interpret the data and every medical condition that will benefit in some shape, way or form the person’s health. Using multiple sensors, one can control the patient on several fronts by means of wireless connections and send the information to a personal server. Technological innovation can contribute to the reorganization of health care, in particular by supporting the shift of the focus of health care from the hospital to the entire territory. This is possible through innovative care models focused on the citizen and facilitating access to services in the territory. The objective is to assure assistance by ensuring the continuity of care. The telemedicine aims to bring the service of the doctor directly to the patient’s home, without the doctor leaving his office and without the patient himself being forced to move. The treatment of chronic diseases through wearable devices and remote monitoring can be a priority area for the application of Telemedicine models. The aim of this project is to use wearable and synchronized devices in order to calculate the Pulse Transit Time (PTT), i.e. the time needed for the Pulse Pressure (PP) wave to propagate through an arterial vessel [6]. Unlike the devices on the market, the possibility of using two non-invasive and non-intrusive devices synchronized through a Bluetooth connection is verified. In fact, results obtained using only one device are compared with those obtained by two devices synchronized among them. It has been demonstrated that PTT is one of the most promising alternatives for calculating blood pressure (BP), as measured with a catheter implanted in the artery. The future objective will be to obtain reliable blood pressure results: the proposed method by wearable devices supplies a promising alternative for a continuous measure of blood pressure, without interrupting any of the user’s daily activities.