A Wireless Ballistocardiographic Chair

This paper presents a wireless ballistocardiographic chair developed for the Proactive Health Monitoring project in the Institute of Signal Processing. EMFi sensors are used for BCG measurement and IEEE 802.15.4 RF link for radio communication between the chair and a PC. The chair measures two BCG signals from the seat and the backrest and a rough ECG signal from the armrests of the chair. The R-spike of the ECG signal can be used as a synchronisation point to extract individual BCG cardiac cycles. Also, two developed methods for extracting BCG cycles without using a reference ECG signal are presented and compared