Design and Development of a Multi-Parameter Wearable Medical Device

Nowadays it has become very important to monitor some vital parameters through the use of wearable devices and to save these data on external devices such as mobile phones or tablets.The purpose of this thesis is to study and create a wearable instrument similar to a bracelet able to monitor the electrocardiogram (ECG) through a one lead measurement and the blood saturation (SpO2) through an integrated optical module given by Maxim IntegratedTM. All data sampled by the device,can be exchanged via Bluetooth® on a mobile App to have the possibility to process them and present results to the user in an easy way in order to facilitate their reading. The device consists in two PCBs one for the ECG monitor and the other one for the SpO2 measure; they are connected together via flat cable so as to insert them in a single case. This system is based on a Texas Instrument 32-bit microcontroller, programmed in a RTOS way. The advantage of Real Time Operating System is the multitasking operation, different tasks in the same project can be easily synchronized. The project starts from an old version of the device and consist in design a new analog front-end for the ECG, choose and insert the blood saturation sensor, draw the new schematic, route all the component in the PCBs, mounting the board, program the microcontroller, update the AndroidTM App and finally test for correct operation.To sum up, this system is used to provide hearth rate, anomalies such as atrial fibrillation and blood saturation. There are several future perspective which consist in introduce a memory inside the board, some other health sensors and adapt the project to more specific purposes such as calculate blood pressure in a non-invasive way through an innovative algorithm that is being developed.