A pilot study on patch sensor based Photo Plethysmography (PPG) for heart rate measurements

The advent of Integrated Healthcare technology has helped in the development of portable medical devices for measuring vital physiological parameters such as such as Blood glucose and Blood pressure etc. These devices can be afforded by the common man and are readily available in the market. Medical devices of this kind give the firsthand information about the health condition of the patient and also suggests patient if any necessary actions need to be taken based on the observed symptoms. Although several attempts have been made to develop wearable non-invasive medical devices, still there is a huge demand to catch the need of resources constrained population. This paper suggests the design of a wearable patch sensor based on Photo Plethysmography (PPG) unit which can be used as a patch sensor or a wearable device for measuring the heart rate of the patient. The device consists of a sensor developed by Maxim Integrated Circuit for acquiring the PPG signal. The heart rate obtained from the PPG device is communicated serially to Arduino Processor using I2C serial communication, also accelerometer is embedded with the system for detecting undesirable hand movement while measuring heart rate from the signal derived from the PPG device. The Arduino Processor is also connected with the blue tooth model for further communication. The sensor can be placed either in cloth or in thin rubber sheet such that total unit can be tied around the wrist or can be designed place in any other part of the body were PPG signal can be recorded. From the preliminary pilot study, it can be concluded that the proposed patch sensor based PPG yields promising results for the measurement of heart rate. The device needs to be validated with large sample size before introducing to the clinical trial.