A low power approach to body position estimation for HF patient monitoring by an ankle positioned Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)

Heart-Failure (HF) is among the leading hospitalization causes in modern healthcare systems. A continuous monitoring wearable device for patient diagnosis and treatment is something that could provide tremendous amount of information for the physician and help in treatment and remote monitoring of HF patients. In this context one of the physical variables which can be analyzed to provide information about the patient status is the activity level and body states; time spent walking, laying down or seated. In this work a preliminar development for a low power device for continuous estimation of activity level and body state is presented.