Smartphone-based system for the monitoring of vital parameters and stress conditions of amatorial racecar drivers

The monitoring of vital parameters for athletes of all disciplines is becoming more and more essential, to improve performances and to ensure a constant control of athletes' physical conditions, thus preventing health risks and injuries. However, especially in amatorial competitions, the low available budget limits leads to the use of inexpensive and thus ineffective instrumentation. In this paper, a low-cost system, based on a commercial smartdevice, for monitoring purposes in the context of amatorial car races is proposed. A single-lead electrocardiographic trace, body temperature, and driver acceleration profile are simultaneously acquired, locally stored and preprocessed, and periodically sent to a cloud service, allowing data sharing and remote processing. Experimental tests operated by means of a Formula SAE car in a test track have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach for the acquisition of important data to evaluate the degree of stress of a driver during the race.