Hello And welcome to the first module. Let us begin our course from the brief introduction into the basic principles of remote health monitoring systems and then switch to the development of basic hardware components of these systems. As you might already know, the healthcare system faces a number of challenges such as increased world population, increasing rate of health care costs and rapidly spreading chronic diseases like diabetes, heart diseases and many others. Possible answer to these challenges would be a development of telemedicine e-health and mobile health also referred to as mHealth technologies. The complex health monitoring system can be presented in a multilevel structure with four levels. The first level of the system is a patient wearable device which provides registration, pre-processing and storage of biomedical signals. On the next level of the system, we receive signals from patient's wearable devices for detailed analysis of data in order to track the current state of the patient. This is a level of patient's mobile device. The third level of the system is the server of the medical institution which collects the data from different sources including, health-related data from patients device as well. The fourth level is a device of the physician with appropriate software for decision support in data analysis. Wearable device registers complex biomedical signals and indicators of body systems' activities with a quality comparable to standard medical devices. At the same time, it is easy to use for people without special training. Monitoring systems might be suitable for everyday life monitoring with minimal level of the negative effect of registration devices on patient's life activities. Its sensord should have minimal size and weight and to provide non-invasive evaluation of indicators, be biologically compatible, of course, and not to annoy the user during the operation. To ensure continuous reliable registration of biomedical signals, a wearable device should have a long battery life up to several days. Therefore, wearable devices not capable for complicated signal pre-processing that requires high performance multiprocessor, and the large power supply. Low energy interfaces like Bluetooth are also recommended for some reason. Most of portable equipment for registration of biomedical signals have common structure. It is now recommended to use highly integrated analog front end modules for medical purposes intended for registration of biopotentials like ECG, oxygen saturation, pulse wave, respiration rate, temperature and many others. The structure of a typical wearable device contains the following components: the set of electrodes and sensors for signal acquisition, several channels and analog front end modules, and a microcontroller. Radio channel transmits the signals, autonomous stand alone power supply unit also has to be there because we have to provide the whole system with the energy and it is usually a lithium polymer battery. The selection of specific system modules, of course, can vary according to the purpose of your device. The second level of a common telemedicine system is the smartphone or a tablet. It provides preliminary processing of biomedical signals. Estimation of diagnostically important indicators, assessment of the current health condition, and an administration of wearable device functioning. Moreover, smartphone software can fire alarms in case of emergency, inform the patient about changes in health condition with its graphical user interface. Transmission of biomedical information by a wireless channel to the server should also be included on this device, of course. Cloud based tools and technologies of the medical institution server present the third level of the system. The medical institutions server receives the biomedical information about patient's current health condition, sends updates of software modules, and settings for individual configuration of the whole system functioning. Finally, the fourth level of the system is formed by a software implemented on the portable or a desktop computer of a physician who receives dedicated information about the patient's current condition. Health status during the long-term monitoring and allows the forecast of patient health state. So, that was a typical structure of a remote health monitoring system. In the next video, we'll talk about some examples of existing systems to get some feeling of how this theory applied in practice.
