Site visit in Tampere on 13 May 2003

The coordination unit made a site visit at Tampere University Hospital on 13 May 2003. Docent Tiit Kööbi and Docent Alpo Värri together with their research groups presented their project on Proactive Health Monitoring.

The aim or the project is to develop a medical chair that imperceptibly monitors cardiac function  and breathing of patients sitting in the chair. The chair will be equipped with EMFi sensors that measure BCG (i.e. ballistocardiograms and ECG). The data is transferred wirelessly to a personal computer. By applying signal processing methods, needed information is extracted from the signals.

Requirements for the wireless communication are high. First, the wireless communication must be suitable for a hospital environment. Second, the radio transmitter signal should not disturb the signals obtained from the EMFi sensor. Under consideration are such technologies as Zigbee, Bluetooth and UWB, out of which Bluetooth may be the most suitable.

The chair is proactive in the sense that it will automatically start measuring the heart rates and breathing of a person sitting in the chair without him or her noticing it. The analysis method has to decide if the signal is valid at a certain moment. Sitting down or getting up is disturbing the signal as well if the person is moving or speaking. The methods also need to separate breathing signals from BCG signals.

Previous studies show that BCG signals are dependent on the patient's age and disease and that they may be highly irregular. Teemu Koivistoinen has just finished a survey of about 100 articles written on this subject. I Irregular signals may be used for predicting diseases. A number of healthy volunteers and patients with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases will be measured in controlled conditions using whole-body cardiography as a reference method, and compared to the BCG results to determine its reliability.

As a result of the project, such a medical chair as described above may be a usual device in future hospitals and GP's offices. The ethical aspects concerning situations where the patient may be measured without knowing it are very important. The research group will be careful in following the ethical guidelines given by the Tampere University Hospital.

More information
For more information, please contact the coordinator of the project, Docent Alpo Värri at the Tampere University of Technology or the other researchers involved. See also the project's web pages at http://www.ucs.uta.fi/~varri/prohemon.htm or the project's pages at this site.

The research consortium consists of the following units and researchers:

• University of Tampere & Tampere University Hospital, Department of Clinical Physiology:
• Professor Väinö Turjanmaa, Docent Tiit Kööbi, PhD students Teemu Koivistoinen
• Tampere University of Technology, Signal Processing Laboratory:
• Docent Alpo Värri, Dr.Tech. Eero Huupponen, PhD students Mikko Koivuluoma, Sakari Junnila, Jarmo Alametsä, Laurentiu Barna

Greger Lindén
Programme Coordinator
Greger.Linden@cs.helsinki.fi