A Wearable Device for Physical Activity Monitoring With Built-in Heart Rate Variability

Anh Dinh, Daniel Teng, Li Chen, Seok-Bum Ko, Yang Shi, Carl McCrosky, Jenny Basran, Vanina Del Bello-Hass University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
email: anh.dinh@usask.ca
AbstractThis paper presents the implementation of a system to sense, collect and store physiology activities for the purpose of monitoring the elderly people and the people who are taking medication. The system includes a wearable device to be worn by the individual to collect physical activity data, a memory card, and a computer to retrieve and analyze data. A heart beat measurement is also included to provide better monitoring. Accelerometer and gyroscope are the main sensing devices. A high capacity SD card is used for data storing. Testing results show the system function properly and provide accurate data for monitoring purposes. Keywords-physical activity monitoring, gyroscope, heart rate variability, homecare accelerometer,

sense his or her movements and vital sign. The device is capable of storing sensor data. Data processing is to be performed offline, after a recording had been completed. II. THE DEVICE

I.

INTRODUCTION

Most older adults have one or more health problems. Their day-to-day and long-term attention has great relevance to primary healthcare providers and their loved ones. Identification and tracking of daily physical activity are key factors to evaluate the quality of life and health status of those people [1,2]. Health condition monitoring of aged is necessary to prevent injuries and guarantee safety social environment in order that old people can enjoy their social actions [3]. The ability to record and classify the movements of an individual is essential when attempting to determine his or her degree of functional ability and general level of activity. In addition to monitoring physical activity on the elderly people, there is a need for the patient health status before and after medication intake [4-6]. In the past, the practice depends on old techniques such as patient diaries, interviews, phone call and self-report using questionnaires. Accuracy of these techniques is questionable not to mention the high cost and time commitment of the healthcare personnel. Numerous physical activity monitoring have been developed in the past. Some of the systems use accelerometers mounted in various locations on the body to record the physical motions [3,7,8,9], the others uses kinematic sensors [10]. Similar systems can be found using video recording with complicated algorithm to determine activities [5]. This paper presents an implementation of a wearable device for monitoring of physical activities of the elderly people and patients who are taking medication. The device detects postural movements using a set of sensors consists of a 3-axial accelerometer, a 2-axial gyroscope, and a heart beat detection circuit. The device is worn on the chest of an individual to

One criteria of the design is to have a small, light weight device, easy to use by the patients targeting the elderly people. Trapping the device on the chest is the wearing method for the design. Low power design is another constraint in this implementation since the device intends to be used for an extended period of time. Shown in Figure 1 is the system setup for monitoring purpose in which the wearable device is to be worn by an individual, a SD card is to store the physical activity and vital sign data. The device consists of a 3-axial accelerometer, a 2-axial gyroscope to capture the wearers postural movements, a heart beat sensor to detect heart beat signal, a data logger to collect physical activity and vital sign and to write the data into the SD card. A rechargeable battery is used to power the device. Healthcare personnel can retrieve all required information from the SD card for monitoring or pre/post-medication analysis. The onboard microcontroller can also be programmed to detect and record the fall of the patients or any irregular vital sign.

Wearable device to be worn on the patient chest ( i.e., sensor node)

Monitoring

Figure 1. System set-up includes a wearable device, a 1GB SD card, and a computer to retrieve and analyze postural movements and heart rate data.

Figure 2 provides a closer look of the wearable device. This device comprises of a high precision accelerometer sensor (Analog Devices ADXL 330), a gyroscope (InvenSense IDG300), a heart beat sensing circuit, and a 3.7V rechargeable battery. The battery is mounted underneath the circuit board. A

978-1-4244-2902-8/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE

battery charging circuit is also built-in on the printed circuit board. The main postural sensing device used in this implementation is the accelerometer, ADXL330, made by Analog Devices. The ADXL330 is a small, thin, low power, complete 3-axis accelerometer with signal conditioned voltage outputs, all on a single monolithic IC. The device measures acceleration with a minimum full-scale range of 3g. It can measure the static acceleration of gravity in tilt-sensing applications, as well as dynamic acceleration resulting from motion, shock, or vibration. The user selects the bandwidth of the accelerometer using the capacitors at the three output x, y, and z. The output bandwidth can be selected to suit the application. Bandwidths of 50Hz for all 3-axis outputs have been selected by bypassing the voltages with 0.1F capacitors. The accelerometer operates on a single supply from 2.0-3.6V with a very low current of 200A.
3.7V, 2000mAh Lithium Battery
ARM processor

Accelerometer and gyroscope

block diagram shown in Figure 3. The filtering and amplification circuitries were built using discrete components on a small PCB. Low power dual-amplifier using a single supply was used in the design. A simple single pole high pass filter is used to eliminate DC level of the heart beat signal from the bias of the microphone. The low pass filter, which is also a single pole filter, is used to diminish the noise beyond the normal frequency of the heart beat which is below 5Hz. The heart beat sensing circuit provides both analog and digital outputs which can be connected to the ADC or digital input of the microcontroller. A mono-stable circuit using a timer IC is used to capture the edge of the heart beat signal. The timer generates a digital signal corresponding to every beat of the heart. The heart beat signal can be very noisy and the echo from the sound of the beat picked up by the microphone can trigger the mono-stable circuit which causes error. The ONtime of the timer circuit is adjusted to eliminate such mishap. The heart beat signal is continuously stored to monitor heart rate variability.
Bias

Gain Microphone MB4015NSC-3 + HPF (0.5Hz)

Gain + LPF (6Hz)

Monostable circuit

Output

Figure 3. Block diagram of the custom built heart beat sensor.

Microphone

1GB SD card

Heart beat sensor circuitry

Figure 2. The wearable device.

Aiding the accelerometer in sensing postural movements, a dual-axis gyroscope is installed in the device. The sensor is an integrated dual-axis gyroscope, IDG-300, made by InvenSense. This MEMS device operates at a single supply voltage of 3.03.5V. The sensor provides analog outputs of x and y rates with a full scale of 5000/sec. The output voltages of the rotations are connected to the onboard ADC of the microcontroller. One of the shortcomings of the gyroscope is its output drifting. This is due to the nature of the gyroscope and the error requires further filtering to correct. This rate sensor consumes power continuously due to its long wake-up time. Both the accelerometer and the gyroscope have very high shock survivability of over 500g. The combination of accelerometer and gyroscope provides a better postural activity measurement as proved in the testing results. The heart beat sensing consists of an acoustic sensor (a microphone) to pick up the sound of the heart beats. The microphone is attached to the belt which is trapped around the chest at the heart location. This microphone is a low cost electret condenser type having a flat response from dc to 10kHz for a near field of 6mm. With appropriate amplification and filtering, the heart beat signal will be obtained using the circuit

The data logger is a module made by Spark Fun Electronics, the Logomatic V1.0. The module includes an ARM processor, the LPC2138 made by NXP (Philips). The LPC2138 microcontroller is based on a 16/32-bit ARM7TDMI-S CPU with real-time emulation and embedded trace support. The microcontroller also has 10 channels 10-bit ADC and all are used in the logger module. The channels can be selected on or off as desired in the logon file stored in the SD card. The file is used to configure the microcontroller upon start-up. The ADC logging can be in ASCII or binary format for ease of use. Sampling rate of the ADC channels can also be selected to fit particular application without over-sampling or over running the SD card capacity. The sampling frequency used in this implementation is 50Hz and can be changed in a logon file. Sensor data are logged in the ASCII format; each measurement of the channel is written in and followed by a delimiting character. At the end of each measurement frame, a carriage return and a line feed are placed for further delimiting. A 1GB SD card is used in this application. This memory capacity is sufficient for at least 100 hours of continuous logging. On average, the logger draws 75mA from a 3.3V supply. III. EXPERIMENT RESULTS One of the wearable devices was trapped on the thorax of a healthy participant to test the system functionalities including data storage, data display and data analysis.

A. Data Collection for Physical Activity and Heart Rate Variability Figure 4 and Figure 5 show the plots for the three-axis accelerometer, the rotational data from the dual-axis gyroscope and the heart beat signal. The data display is for a variety of movements of the wearer during the test. Figure 6 shows an example of the data stored in the SD card read by the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The sampling rate is 50 samples per second. In this example, the 1st to 3rd columns list the x, y, and z values of the accelerometer. The 4th and 5th columns store x and y rates of the gyroscope and the last 2 columns contain digital and analog values of the heart beat signal. The raw data stored in the SD card can now be viewed and processed off-line in a computer. The size of the data file is to be determined by the data polling rate and the number of hours to be observed. B. Data Analyzing Numerous techniques to classify human movement using accelerometer data have been published [7,11,12,13]. In this implementation, machine learning method was used to identify
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the fall and some of the simple physical activities. This experiment focuses in using acceleration and gyroscope data to detect a fall since the elderly people are our target group. Test data are classified into 7 different postural movements: standing, walking, lying, forward fall, backward fall, left fall, and right fall. Five algorithms have been used for the machine learning methods to test the data: Naive Bayes [14], support vector machine, C4.5, ripple down rule learner, and radial basis function network. Due to its high accuracy and fast model building, the Nave Bayes algorithm was chosen to use in the Java based data mining tool WEKA (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) [15]. It has also been observed that the data from the accelerometer achieved only 90% of accuracy but when they are combined with the gyroscope data, the detection probability has increased to 97%. This agrees with the finding in [16] in which the simultaneous use of accelerometer, gyroscope and tilt sensor increases the fall detection accuracy.

Amplitude

Accelerometer data: x y z

Amplitude

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Gyroscope data: x y

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walking

sitting

standing up & walking

sitting quick standing-up, sitting, and lying

sittingup

standing-up & sitting-down

Figure 4. Plots of postural movements when the device is worn vertically on the chest. The data is raw data, i.e., accelerometer data are not converted into gravity force, g, and gyroscope data are not converted into degree/second.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT This project is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada under Strategic Project Grant number STPGP 350545. REFERENCES
[1] C. M. Musil et al, Health Problems and Health Actions Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults: Results of a Health Diary Study, Applied Nursing Research, Vol. 11, No. 3, August 1998, pp. 138147. J. K. Wu, L. Dong, and W. Xiao, Real-time Physical Activity Classification and Tracking using Wearable Sensors, 6th International Conference on Information, Communications & Signal Processing (ICICS), December 2007, pp.1-6. A. Makikawa, S. Asajima, K. Shibuya, R. Tokue, H. Shinohara, Portable Physical Activity Monitoring System for the Evaluation of Activity of Aged in Daily Life, 2nd Joint EMBS/BMES Conference, Houston, Texas, USA, October 23-26, 2002, pp. 1908-1909. A. Batz, M. Batz, N.V. Lobo, M. Shah, A computer Vision System for Monitoring Medication Intake, 2nd Canada Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV05), May 1-11, 2005. S. Ammouri and G.A. Bilodeau, Face and Hands Detection and Tracking Applied to The Monitoring of Medication Intake, Canada Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV08), May 28-30, 2008, pp. 147-154. D.M. Serrill, R. Hughes, S.S. Salles. T. Lie-Nemeth, M. Akay, D.G. Standeart, P. Bonato, Advanced Analysis of Wearable Sensor Data to Adjust Medication Intake in Patients with Parkinsons Disease, 2nd International IEEE EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering, Arlington, Virginia, USA, March 16-19, 2005, pp. v-viii. J. Han, H. Kim, S. Choi, K.S. Park, Indoor Activity Monitoring System Using an Accelerometer and ZigBee, 6th International Special Topic Conference on ITAB, Tokyo, Japan, 2007, pp. 177-178. C.V. Bouten, K.T. Koekkoek, M. Verduin, R. Kodde and J.D. Janssen, A triaxial accelerometer and portable data processing unit for the assessment of daily physical activity, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 44, no. 3, March 1997, pp. 136147. M.J. Mathie, A.C.F. Coster, N.H. Lovell, and B.G. Celler, A pilot study of long term monitoring of human movements in the home using accelerometry, J. Telemed. Telecare, vol. 10, 2004, pp. 144151. B. Najafi, et al, An Ambulatory System for Physical Activity Monitoring in Elderly, 1st Annual International IEEE-EMBS Special Topic Conference on Microtechnologies in Medicine & Biology, Lyon, France, October 12-14, 2000, pp. 562-566. L. Dong, J. Wu, X. Chen, Real-Time Physical Activity Monitoring by Data Fusion in Body Sensor Networks, 10th International Conference on Information Fusion, July 2007, pp. 1-7. D.M. Karantonis, M.R. Narayanan, N.H. Lovell, and B.G. Celler, Implementation of a Real-Time Human Movement Classifier Using a Triaxial Accelerometer for Ambulatory Monitoring, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, Vol. 10, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 156-157. E. Cordera, A.M. Lopez, D. Alvarez, R.C. Gonzalez, J.C. Alvarez, Physical activity classification from body center of gravity accelerations, International Conference on Intelligent Environments, September 2007, pp. 477-480. J. Anderson and M. Matessa, Exploration of an incremental, Bayesian algorithm for categorization, Machine Learning, 9:275-308, 1992. http://www.cs.waikato/ac/nz/ml/weka J.Y. Hwang, J.M. Kang, Y.W. Jang, H.C. Kim, Development of novel algorithm and real-time monitoring ambulatory system using Bluetooth module for fall detection in the elderly, IEMBS04, Vol. 3, pp. 22042207

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[2]

[3]

[4]

Figure 5. Plot of the heart beat signal showing a 68 beat-per-minute and a zooming in of the heart beat signal with edge detection to convert to the digital signal.

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8] Figure 6. Data storage includes accelerometer data (x,y,z), gyroscope data (x,y), and heart beat signal (digital and analog).

[9]

Test results on a fully-charged battery (2000mAh) showing the wearable device can properly operate for 26 hours. The gyroscope and the heart beat circuit use power continuously while the accelerometer can be put into sleep mode if desired. As the battery voltage falls below 3.0V, the gyroscope stops functioning while the other parts of the wearable device still operate. IV. CONCLUSION

[10]

[11]

[12]

An off-line physical activity monitoring system was successfully designed and built. The system is also embedded with vital sign for heart rate variability monitoring. The wearable device and system functionalities were verified successfully on a healthy individual. The tests have not been conducted on the people as the system is designed for. Further experiments are required in order to evaluate the performance of the system on the target group of people. The system provides accurate physiological activity data to the needs for monitoring elderly people or people having medication intake. Off-line data process should be improved to wireless transmitting plus real-time data process which can be more useful for saving life when heart or body meets problems.

[13]

[14] [15] [16]