Degree's Final Thesis in collaboration with the Instrumentation, Sensors and Interfaces research group. Supervised by Dr. Óscar Casas. Data obtained from 13 healthy Subjects.
Nowadays cardiovascular diseases are a main concern in the society as they impact several lives. Given the increase of lifespan humankind has experienced and the spreading of bad habit such as sedentariness, the monitorization of the cardiovascular system for all kinds of people is becoming more frequent just to detect, diagnose and treat cardiovascular problems associated to its worsening. Even though recent technologies have allowed the development of a wide and diverse variety of new devices to monitor and check the cardiovascular system state, the most common used ones are a still techniques and methods that are invasive and uncomfortable to perform. This is why, in the context of my final degree thesis within a bioengineering research group, a model to characterize the cardiovascular system was developed in order to improve the comfortability of patients and decrease the amount of time required to do all procedures, while obtaining equally accurate results.
The main goal of this work is to study the capability to check the cardiovascular system using IPG signals in different spots of the body, allowing a brand-new versatility in the way some measures are performed. Different ECG, ICG, IPG and PPG signals will be acquired and processed to be characterized in different locations of the human body.
A first study of the evolution of the pulse wave form when propagating throughout the body will be performed. To do so, the ICG signal will be measured using different body locations in order to understand the behavior of the way and if it is possible to use more comfortable spots such as the lower parts of limbs to get measurements that traditionally have required more uncomfortable spots such as the chest and thorax. The impedance IPG signals will be studied and characterized as a suitable alternative for the ICG signals, allowing both patients and medicals make measures of interest in more comfortable spots and obtain theoretically the same information.
During this thesis a device is proposed to obtain the electrocardiogram, impedance plethysmography and a photoplethysmography as well. All the signals can be observed in the following figure, where all important metrics have been already detected and charectarized.
This device is intended to be lowcost and allowing the tracking of an individual cardiovascular health using the most comfortable measures for each patient. This device has connectivity via wire along with a battery supporting over many hours of continuous operation. The visualization of these signals will be done on a computer, where a post-processing of the information could be performed as well.