Health & Environmental Research Online (HERO)


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3358400 
Journal Article 
Low Power Wearable Systems for Continuous Monitoring of Environment and Health for Chronic Respiratory Disease 
Dieffenderfer, J; Goodell, H; Mills, S; Mcknight, M; Yao, S; Lin, F; Beppler, E; Bent, B; Lee, B; Misra, V; Zhu, Y; Oralkan, O; Strohmaier, J; Muth, J; Peden, D; Bozkurt, A 
2016 
20 
5 
1251-1264 
English 
27249840 
WOS:000384000700007 
We present our efforts towards enabling a wearable sensor system that allows for the correlation of individual environmental exposures to physiologic and subsequent adverse health responses. This system will permit a better understanding of the impact of increased ozone levels and other pollutants on chronic asthma conditions. We discuss the inefficiency of existing commercial off-the-shelf components to achieve continuous monitoring and our system-level and nano-enabled efforts towards improving the wearability and power consumption. Our system consists of a wristband, a chest patch, and a handheld spirometer. We describe our preliminary efforts to achieve a sub-milliwatt system ultimately powered by the energy harvested from thermal radiation and motion of the body with the primary contributions being an ultra-low power ozone sensor, an volatile organic compounds sensor, spirometer, and the integration of these and other sensors in a multimodal sensing platform. The measured environmental parameters include ambient ozone concentration, temperature, and relative humidity. Our array of sensors also assesses heart rate via photoplethysmography and electrocardiography , respiratory rate via photoplethysmography, skin impedance, three-axis acceleration, wheezing via a microphone, and expiratory airflow. The sensors on the wristband, chest patch, and spirometer consume 0.83, 0.96, and 0.01 milliwatts respectively. The data from each sensor is continually streamed to a peripheral data aggregation device and is subsequently transferred to a dedicated server for cloud storage. Future work includes reducing the power consumption of the system-on-chip including radio to reduce the entirety of each described system in the sub-milliwatt range.