Continuous vital monitoring and automated alert message generation for motorbike riders

We present an integrated sensor system for continuous monitoring of motorcyclists, which aims to benefit from the growing acceptance for wearable electronics, but goes beyond the most common life-style applications by trying to improve the user's safety. Our system features a textile front end (garment, e.g. shirt) with integrated ECG electrodes and respiration sensor as well as electronics for data acquisition, signal conditioning and onboard processing. ECG and respiration signals are processed not only to give the user feedback on his health status, but are further analyzed to detect fatigue and trigger a driver warning and thus avoid critical situations. In addition inertial sensors are used to detect accidents and trigger an emergency call, compliant to the eCall standard, if necessary. In case of an accidents health data can be online provided to first responders, before they reach the accident site. This paper includes a short description of the overall system, discusses methods to adapt the vital sign monitoring to our application and evaluates signal quality with of the acquired ECG signal. Our results indicate, that our system allows reliable heart rate measurements even on long motorbike rides.