Physiological monitoring techniques for home health care.

Practical techniques of nonconstrained physiological monitoring which are acceptable in daily life have been attempted, and obtained preliminary results: Successive records of temperature profile on a bed provide information such as body movement, and sleep hours. ECG can be recorded automatically in a bathtub with electrodes on the inside wall of the tub. Heart rate can be measured by ECG taken at a toilet seat. Proposed techniques do not require any effort of measurement procedure to the subject, and thus it is expected that physiological data can be accumulated automatically even though subjects never aware the monitoring procedure.