Sensing Technologies for Oxygen Therapy Monitoring: A Survey

Supplemental oxygen is recognized worldwide as a life-saving treatment for first aid, acute and chronic diseases, and this has recently become more important than ever, due to the recent Covid-19 pandemic. This study aims to analyze two important issues related to oxygen therapy in patients with respiratory difficulties, namely oxygen quality and patient safety monitoring. The specific case in which the supply of oxygen fails due to the disconnection of the nasal cannula has no solution in the open literature. As a result, tangible results on how such risk can be avoided are still missing, and hardly any guideline can be found on how to treat this issue from the engineering perspective. In this respect, this work is dedicated to exploring sensing technologies used to detect vital signs and track the patient's condition in real time during therapy, with the aim of defining a starting picture of the current state of the art. The results obtained following the verification of some of the most used sensors in the market are therefore presented and discussed. The integration of these components in an embedded system has also allowed us to understand the practical limits and strengths in terms of complexity and effectiveness of each technology. © 2022 IEEE.

A Review for Designing a Low-Cost Online Lower Limb Monitoring System of a Post-stroke Rehabilitation

The physical therapy generally requires direct assistance from therapists continuously, however, the time is very limited. Moreover, the social distancing policy in the COVID-19 pandemic period made the patient could not come to rehabilitation center for physical therapy. Remote physical therapy is suggested to reduce dependency of therapist for conducting the physical therapy. However, there is few information about the necessary parameters in lower limb monitoring of post-stroke patient. Therefore, in this paper, a review for designing a low-cost online homecare physical therapy monitoring system is proposed. Article finding had been done using online search engine Google Scholars to conclude the design of the online monitoring system. Several keywords had been used, such as “online stroke rehabilitation monitoring,” “stroke rehabilitation parameters,” “stroke monitoring Internet of Things,” and “lower limb stroke monitoring.” The results show that the necessary monitor parameters are lower limb kinematics and dynamics, which can be complimented by bio-signal data, such as EMG. The lower limb monitoring system can use IMU, muscle sensor, and footswitches to measure the necessary parameters. IMU measures the lower limb kinematics because it provides wide range of measurement. Muscle sensor, which compatible to microcontroller, measures the EMG. Lastly, the footswitches detect the gait phases, which classify the measured data for more in-depth analysis. The mentioned sensors are cheap and available in the online market of Indonesia, which is suitable to realize a low-cost lower limb monitoring system. The research finding also suggests quick and accurate feedback mechanism for improving the training quality, which the feedback is combination of therapist opinion and artificial intelligence prediction. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Cell-free nucleic acid patterns in disease prediction and monitoring-hype or hope?

Interest in the use of cell-free nucleic acids (CFNAs) as clinical non-invasive biomarker panels for prediction and prevention of multiple diseases has greatly increased over the last decade. Indeed, circulating CFNAs are attributable to many physiological and pathological processes such as imbalanced stress conditions, physical activities, extensive apoptosis of different origin, systemic hypoxic-ischemic events and tumour progression, amongst others. This article highlights the involvement of circulating CFNAs in local and systemic processes dealing with the question, whether specific patterns of CFNAs in blood, their detection, quantity and quality (such as their methylation status) might be instrumental to predict a disease development/progression and could be further utilised for accompanying diagnostics, targeted prevention, creation of individualised therapy algorithms, therapy monitoring and prognosis. Presented considerations conform with principles of 3P medicine and serve for improving individual outcomes and cost efficacy of medical services provided to the population.