• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.63-76
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of contact type textile electrode structure on heart activity signal acquisition for smart healthcare. In this study, we devised six contact type textile electrodes whose electrode size and configuration were manipulated for measuring heart activity signals using computerized embroidery. We detected heart activity signals using a modified lead II and by attaching each textile electrode to the chest band in four healthy male subjects in a standing static posture. We measured the signals four times repeatedly for all types of electrodes. The heart activity signals were sampled at 1 kHz using a BIOPAC ECG100, and the detected original signals were filtered through a band-pass filter. To compare the performance of heart activity signal acquisition among the different structures of the textile electrodes, we conducted a qualitative analysis using signal waveform and size as parameters. In addition, we performed a quantitative analysis by calculating signal power ratio (SPR) of the heart activity signals obtained through each electrode. We analyzed differences in the performance of heart activity signal acquisition of the six electrodes by performing difference and post-hoc tests using nonparametric statistic methods on the calculated SPR. The results showed a significant difference both in terms of qualitative and quantitative aspects of heart activity signals among the tested contact type textile electrodes. Regarding the configurations of the contact type textile electrodes, the three-dimensionally inflated electrode (3DIE) was found to obtain better quality signals than the flat electrode. However, regarding the electrode size, no significant difference was found in performance of heart signal acquisition for the three electrode sizes. These results suggest that the configuration method (flat/3DIE), which is one of the two requirements of a contact type textile electrode structure for heart activity signal acquisition, has a critical effect on the performance of heart activity signal acquisition for wearable healthcare. Based on the results of this study, we plan to develop a smart clothing technology that can monitor high-quality heart activity without time and space constraints by implementing a clothing platform integrated with the textile electrode and developing a performance improvement plan.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.372-377
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• 2014

Being able to monitor the heart will allow the diagnosis of heart diseases for patients during daily activities, and the detection of burden on the heart during strenuous exercise. Furthermore, with the help of U-health technology, immediate medical action can be taken, in the case of abnormal symptoms of the heart in daily life. Therefore, it appears to be necessary to develop the corresponding technology to monitor the condition of the heart daily. In this study, a novel wearable smart system was proposed, to monitor the activity of the heart in daily life, and to further evaluate the rhythm of arrhythmia. The wearable system includes three modified bipolar conductive fiber electrodes in the chest part, which can resolve the reduction problem of the magnitude of the signal, by magnifying the signal and removing the noise, to obtain high affinity and validity for medical-type usage (<0.903%). The biological signal acquisition and data lines, and the signal processing engine and communication consist of a conductive ink, and the pic18 and ANT protocol nRF24AP2, respectively. The proposed algorithm was able to detect a strong ECG, signal and r-point passing over the noise. The confidence intervals were 96 %, which could satisfy the requirement to detect arrhythmia under the unconstrained conditions.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2016.05a
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• pp.252-255
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• 2016

The objective of this paper is to find an easier and non-invasive a way of diagnosing heart diseases based on the heart sound, rigidly heart murmurs, recordings from subjects. Although most of the heart sounds can be easily heard, analysis of the findings by auscultation strongly depends on skills and experience of the physician. Therefore, the heart murmur is require quantitative analysis for automatic diagnosis equipment. For a good sound analysis, the noisy component ware filtered. This can be done using Wiener filter. Once the signal is filtered, it can be segmented into its basic components by signal energy using FFT. After segment the heart sound signal, the relative positions of the different heart sound components will be identified and will be used for quantification purposes. We are using murmur energy ratio. The experimental results are fairly good in relation to automatic diagnosis.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.108-112
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• 2001

Heart sound contains rich information regarding the dynamics of the heart and the auscultation has been a first choice of routine procedures for diagnosis of the heart. However, heart sounds captured using a conventional stethoscope are not often loud or clear enough for doctors to precisely classify their characteristics, especially, under the noisy environments of the hospital. A simple auscultation device that removed shortcomings of the conventional stethoscope was constructed in the study. The device employed a polymer based adherent differential output sensor which was on contact with skin through a coupling medium and appropriated electronic circuits for signal amplification and conditioning An ordinary headphone is taken to hear the captured heart sounds and the volume can be adjusted to hear well. It is also possible that the device sends the captured heart sound signals to a PC where the signals are further processed and viualized.

• Proceedings of the Korea Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• 2000.08a
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• pp.185-188
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• 2000

Heart sound contains rich information regarding the dynamics of the heart and the auscultation has been a first choice of routine procedures for diagnosis of the heart. However, heart sounds captured using a conventional stethoscope are not often loud or clear enough for doctors to precisely classify their characteristics, especially, under the noisy environments of the hospital. A simple auscultation device that removed shortcomings of the conventional stethoscope was constructed in the study. The device employed a polymer based adherent differential output sensor which was on contact with skin through a coupling medium and appropriated electronic circuits for signal amplification and conditioning. An ordinary headphone is taken to hear the captured heart sounds and the volume can be adjusted to hear well. It is also possible that the device sends the captured heart sound signals to a PC where the signals are further processed and viualized.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.576-583
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• 2008

In this study, we attempt to design a real-time autonomic nervous system(ANS) evaluation system usable during exercise using heart instantaneous frequency(HIF). Although heart rate variability(HRV) is considered to be a representative signal widely used ANS evaluation system, the R-peak detection process must be included to obtain an HRV signal, which involves a high sampling frequency and interpolation process. In particular, it cannot accurately evaluate the ANS using HRV signals during exercise because it is difficult to detect the R-peak of electrocardiogram(ECG) signals with exposure to many noises during exercise. Therefore, in this study, we develop the ground for a system that can analyze an ANS in real-time by using the HIF signal circumventing the problem of the HRV signal during exercise. First, we compare the HRV and HIF signals in order to prove that the HIF signal is more efficient for ANS analysis than HRV signals during exercise. Further, we performed real-time ANS analysis using HIF and confirmed that the exerciser's ANS variation experiences massive surges at points of acceleration and deceleration of the treadmill(similar to HRV).

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.67 no.6
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• pp.794-798
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• 2018

There is a growing need for a care system that can continuously monitor, manage and effectively relieve stress for modern people. In recent years, mobile healthcare devices capable of measuring heart rate have become popular, and many stress monitoring techniques using heart rate variability analysis have been actively proposed and commercialized. In addition, respiratory biofeedback methods are used to provide stress relieving services in environments using mobile healthcare devices. In this case, breathing information should be measured well to assess whether the user is doing well in biofeedback training. In this study, we extracted the heart beat interval signal from the PPG and used the oscillator based notch filter based on the IIR band pass filter to track the strongest frequency in the heart beat interval signal. The respiration signal was then estimated by filtering the heart beat interval signal with this frequency as the center frequency. Experimental results showed that the number of breathing could be measured accurately when the subject was guided to take a deep breath. Also, in the timeing measurement of inspiration and expiration, a time delay of about 1 second occurred. It is expected that this will provide a respiratory biofeedback service that can assess whether or not breathing exercise are performed well.

• Progress in Superconductivity and Cryogenics
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.1-6
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• 2007

As very sensitive magnetic field sensors, superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) are used to measure magnetic field signals from the human heart. By analyzing these cardiomagnetic signals, functional diagnoses of heart can be done. In order to measure weak biomagnetic signals, we need a multichannel SQUID array with sensor coverage large enough to cover the whole heart to enable the measurement in a single position setting. In this paper, we review the recent development of SQUID systems for measuring cardiomagnetic fields, with special emphasis on SQUID types.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.2E
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• pp.72-78
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• 2009

Heart sound segmentation into its components, S1, systole, S2 and diastole is the first step of analysis and the most important part in the automatic diagnosis of heart sounds. Conventionally, the Shannon energy envelope peak detection method has been popularly used due to its superior performance in locating S1 and S2. Recently, the HMM has been shown to be quite suitable in modeling the heart sound signal and its use in segmenting the heart sound signal has been suggested with some success. In this paper, we compared the two methods for heart sound segmentation using a common database. Experimental tests carried out on the 4 different types of heart sound signals showed that the segmentation accuracy relative to the manual segmentation was 97.4% in the HMM based method which was larger than 91.5% in the peak detection method.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.407-413
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• 2018

Most sleep apnea patients exhibit severe snoring, and long-lasting sleep apnea may cause insomnia, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, and other diseases. Although polysomnography is the typical sleep diagnostic method to accurately diagnose sleep apnea by measuring a variety of bio-signals that occur during sleep, it is inconvenient as the patient has to sleep with attached electrodes at the hospital for the diagnosis. In this study, a diagnostic pillow is designed to measure respiration, heart rate, and snoring during sleep, using only one polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) sensor. A PVDF sensor with piezoelectric properties was inserted into a specially made instrument to extract accurate signals regardless of the posture during sleep. Wavelet analysis was used to identify the extractability and frequency domain signals of respiration, heart rate, and snoring from the signals generated by the PVDF sensor. In particular, to separate the respiratory signal in the 0.2~0.5 Hz frequency region, wavelet analysis was performed after removing 1~2 Hz frequency components. In addition, signals for respiration, heart rate, and snoring were separated from the PVDF sensor signal through a Butterworth filter and median filter based on the information obtained from the wavelet analysis. Moreover, the possibility of measuring sleep apnea from these separated signals was confirmed. To verify the usefulness of this study, data obtained during sleeping was used.