Development of a portable vital sensing system for home telemedicine.

For safe and effective home medical care, a network system for observing one's vital signs noninvasively and evaluating one's health conditions is highly desirable. In this paper, we described a portable vital sensing system and a home medical server to establish a home telemedicine system. In order to develop a portable vital sensing system, physiological sensing circuit, digital signal processor and wireless communication device are integrated into a small electrical circuit, called "smart telecom unit" with a size of 25mm * 37mm. By using a smart telecom unit, noninvasive vital sensing units including blood pressure, electrocardiograph, pulse wave and body temperature were developed. These sensing units are able to communicate vital records to a home medical server, which consists of a small computer and virtual physiological model to estimate health conditions and can seamlessly connect to the Internet. The accuracy and stability were evaluated in the system performance test. As a result of a performance test of a portable vital sensing system, these vital data could be measured easily and noninvasively. In addition, vital sensing system is able to communicate vital records to home medical server. Hence, it could be confirmed that it was useful to analyze daily health condition in order to prevent a lifestyle disease like hypertension, hyperlipidemia and diabetes.