KiMS: Kids' Health Monitoring System at day-care centers using wearable sensors and vocabulary-based acoustic signal processing

Wearable sensors for healthcare and wireless health monitoring are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. They enable remote, accurate and low-cost health monitoring and can provide personal healthcare with timely detection of health issues. In this paper, we present a novel integrated system for monitoring children at day-care centers in order to facilitate proper care of health issues and overall wellbeing, including early detection of symptoms for various diseases, post-treatment monitoring as well as encouraging healthy habits and activities. The proposed “Kids Health Monitoring System”, referred to as KiMS, is built around a wearable acoustic sensor with embedded digital signal processing capabilities in order to detect various audio signals of interest, such as coughs, sneezes, and cries. It is also equipped with wearable body temperature and pulse rate sensors, along with on-site processing and a Bluetooth unit for communicating alerts and activity on a timely basis. The record of a child's activities can be used by daycare specialist, parents or the healthcare provider for understanding the probable cause or time of onset of symptoms and encouraging healthy habits. This paper also presents a signal processing framework for feature detection and classification of various audio signals, under varying Signal to Noise Ratios (SNR).