Ricerc@Sapienza

Remote sensing of patients' vital parameters is an emerging research topic in advanced Countries, due to the increasing percentage of elderly population.
VI-SENS project aims at developing a compact e-Health solution for remote wireless monitoring of key vital parameters, including respiratory activity, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure. This will be obtained by combining a small-scale wireless network with a broadband cellular communication system, in order to provide a higher quality health service, both at home and at the hospital.
Wearable sensors will be integrated, using low-cost and low-consumption microcontrollers with a wireless interface, in a network capable of transmitting monitored parameters to a processing unit. This unit provides a graphical user interface to give 1) an immediate overview of the set of the monitored parameters and 2) the ability to automatically forward alarms to doctors and/or healthcare personnel. An innovative feature of the VI-SENS solution is that the patient is free to move during the monitoring and this greatly improves the patient's quality of life.
To validate the system from a practical point of view, the results of the monitoring obtained with the proposed solution will be compared with gold-standard measurements obtained by using conventional instruments (e.g., ECG, spirometer).
A key outcome of this research project is the reduction of the overall costs for the National health care system due to the possibility of avoiding or reducing the patient recovery period at hospital.