Wearable Bio-Impedance Analysis for Hydration Monitoring in Medical Applications

Nowadays, bio-impedance analysis (BIA) is widely used in biomedical technology especially to follow the body composition, for instance the hydration of a patient. The development of patient's health monitoring at home requires designing a simple and wearable device to obtain the BIA. To follow the patient's hydration at home, the present study describes a specific electronic shield developed with a Texas Instrument microcontroller. The precision is below 2% for the best case of accuracy measurement. As with dialysis and with many chronic diseases, the main abnormality in the body composition is reduced muscle mass. This is due to extra-cellular tissue hydration modifications. A wearable BIA device can help for following such variations. First measurement results will be given assessing the potential of hydration monitoring at home.