Feasibility Testing of Wearable Device for Musculoskeletal Monitoring during Aquatic Therapy and Rehabilitation.

The objectives of this study were to test the feasibility of the developed waterproof wearable device with a Surface Electromyography (sEMG) sensor and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor by (1) comparing the onset duration of sEMG recordings from maximal voluntary contractions (MVC), (2) comparing the acceleration of arm movement from IMU, and (3) observing the reproducibility of onset duration and acceleration from the developed device for bicep brachii (BB) muscle between on dry-land, and in aquatic environments. Five healthy males participated in two experimental protocols with the activity of BB muscle of the left and right arms. Using the sEMG of BB muscle, the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) and typical error (CV%) were calculated to determine the reproducibility and precision of onset duration and acceleration, respectively. In case of onset duration, no significant differences were observed between land and aquatic condition (p = 0.9-0.98), and high reliability (ICC = 0.93-0.98) and precision (CV% = 2.7-6.4%) were observed. In addition, acceleration data shows no significant differences between land and aquatic condition (p = 0.89-0.93), and high reliability (ICC = 0.9-0.97) and precision (CV% = 7.9-9.2%). These comparable sEMG and acceleration values in both dry-land and aquatic environment supports the suitability of the proposed wearable device for musculoskeletal monitoring during aquatic therapy and rehabilitation as the integrity of the sEMG and acceleration recordings maintained during aquatic activities.Clinical Relevance-This study and relevant experiment demonstrate the feasibility of the developed wearable device to support clinicians and therapists for musculoskeletal monitoring during aquatic therapy and rehabilitation.

A New Technique to Estimate the Cole Model for Bio-impedance Spectroscopy with the High-Frequency Characteristics Estimation.

Bio-impedance spectroscopy (BIS) is a sophisticated testing technique used to analyze impedance changes at different frequencies. In this study, we investigated the estimation of the Cole Model for BIS measurements without the need for high-frequency resistance and reactance measurements, where they are inaccurate due to leakage capacitences. We employed a Texas Instruments evaluation kit (AFE4300) and compared the Cole plots of two different circuit models of tissue between the proposed configuration and a commercial impedance analyzer used as a reference. To enhance the performance of the AFE4300, we incorporated an external direct digital synthesis (DDS) to generate higher frequencies. The results demonstrated the reliability of the proposed theoretical estimation technique in accurately estimating the resistances and capacitance of the Cole Model.

Applicability of Cloud Native-based Healthcare Monitoring Platform (CN-HMP) in Older Adult Facilities.

Over the past few decades, the world has faced the huge demographic change in the aging population, which makes significant challenges in healthcare systems. The increasing older adult population along with the current health workforce shortage creates a struggling situation for current facilities and personnel to meet the demand. To tackle this situation, cloud computing is a fast-growing area in digital healthcare and it allows to settle up a modern distributed system environment, capable of scaling to tens of thousands of self healing multitenant nodes for healthcare applications. In addition, cloud native architecture is recently getting focused as an ideal structure for multi-node based healthcare monitoring system due to its high scalability, low latency, and rapid and stable maintainability. In this study, we proposed a cloud native-based rapid, robust, and productive digital healthcare platform which allows to manage and care for a large number of patient groups. To validate our platform, we simulated our Cloud Nativebased Healthcare Monitoring Platform (CN-HMP) with real-time setup and evaluated the performance in terms of request response time, data packets delivery, and end-to-end latency. We found it showing less than 0.1 ms response time in at least 92.5% of total requests up to 3K requests, and no data packet loss along with more than 28% of total data packets with no latency and only ≈ 0.6% of those with maximum latency (3 ms) in 24-hour observation. Clinical Relevance- This study and relevant experiment demonstrate the suitability of the CN-HMP to support providers and nurses for elderly patients healthcare with regular monitoring in older adult facilities.