Citation

Curone D, Secco E, Caldani L, Lanatà A, Paradiso R, Tognetti A, Magenes G. IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. Biomed. 2012; 16(3): 501-511.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

DOI

10.1109/TITB.2011.2182615

PMID

22231710

Abstract

In the last few years, many efforts have been spent on the development of wearable sensing systems able to monitor physiological, behavioral and environmental parameters. Less has been done on the accurate testing and assessment of this instrumentation, especially when considering devices thought to be used in harsh environments by subjects or operators performing intense physical activities. This work presents methodology and results of the evaluation of wearable physiological sensors under these conditions. The methodology has been applied to a specific textile based prototype, aimed at the real-time monitoring of rescuers in emergency contexts, which has been developed within a EU funded project called ProeTEX. Wearable sensors measurements have been compared with the ones of suitable gold standards through Bland-Altman statistical analysis; tests were realized in controlled environments simulating typical intervention conditions, with temperatures ranging from 20°C to 45°C and subjects performing mild to very intense activities. This evaluation methodology demonstrated to be effective for the definition of the limits of use of wearable sensors. Furthermore, the ProeTEX prototype demonstrated to be reliable, since it produced negligible errors when used for up to one hour in normal environmental temperature (20°C, 35°C) and up to 30 minutes in harsher environment (45°C).

Language: en