Empowering People with a User-Friendly Wearable Platform for Unobtrusive Monitoring of Vital Physiological Parameters.

Elderly people feel vulnerable especially after they are dismissed from health care facilities and return home. The purpose of this work was to alleviate this sense of vulnerability and empower these people by giving them the opportunity to unobtrusively record their vital physiological parameters. Bearing in mind all the parameters involved, we developed a user-friendly wrist-wearable device combined with a web-based application, to adequately address this need. The proposed compilation obtains the photoplethysmogram (PPG) from the subject's wrist and simultaneously extracts, in real time, the physiological parameters of heart rate (HR), blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) and respiratory rate (RR), based on algorithms embedded on the wearable device. The described process is conducted solely within the device, favoring the optimal use of the available resources. The aggregated data are transmitted via Wi-Fi to a cloud environment and stored in a database. A corresponding web-based application serves as a visualization and analytics tool, allowing the individuals to catch a glimpse of their physiological parameters on a screen and share their digital information with health professionals who can perform further processing and obtain valuable health information.

Towards the Definition of an Intelligent Triage and Continuous Monitoring System for Hospital Emergency Departments and Clinics.

Recent statistics have demonstrated that Emergency Departments (EDs) in Greece lack in organization and service. In most cases, patient prioritization is not automatically implemented. The main objective of this paper is to present IntelTriage, a smart triage system, that dynamically assigns priorities to patients in an ED and monitors their vital signs and location during their stay in the clinic through wearable biosensors. Initital scenarios and functional requirements are presented as preliminary results.