A Wearable Pulse Oximeter With Wireless Communication and Motion Artifact Tailoring for Continuous Use

• Published in: IEEE transactions on biomedical engineering Vol. 66; no. 6; pp. 1505 - 1513
• Main Authors: Chacon, Pedro J., Pu, Limeng, da Costa, Tallis H., Shin, Young-Ho, Ghomian, Taher, Shamkhalichenar, Hamed, Wu, Hsiao-Chun, Irving, Brian A., Choi, Jin-Woo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01-06-2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Accuracy; Adolescent; Adult; Algorithms; Biomedical monitoring; Biomedical sensors; Biosensors; Blood; blood oxygen level; Female; Heart rate; Heart Rate - physiology; Humans; Male; Miniaturization; Mobile communication systems; motion artifact removal; Motion artifacts; Motion measurement; Movement; Movement - physiology; Optics; Optimization; Oximetry; Oximetry - instrumentation; Oximetry - methods; Oxygen - blood; Oxygenation; photoplethysmography; Photoplethysmography - instrumentation; pulse oximetry; Real time; Real-time systems; Reflectance; Signal processing; Signal processing algorithms; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted - instrumentation; Signal quality; wearable devices; Wearable Electronic Devices; Wearable technology; Wireless communications; Wireless Technology - instrumentation; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0018-9294; 1558-2531
• DOI: 10.1109/TBME.2018.2874885

Advances in several engineering fields have led to a trend toward miniaturization and portability of wearable biosensing devices, which used to be confined to large tools and clinical settings. Various systems to continuously measure electrophysiological activity through electrical and optical methods are one category of such devices. Being wearable and intended for prolonged use, the amount of noise introduced on sensors by movement remains a challenge and requires further optimization. User movement causes motion artifacts that alter the overall quality of the signals obtained, hence corrupting the resulting measurements. This paper introduces a fully wearable optical biosensing system to continuously measure pulse oximetry and heart rate, utilizing a reflectance-based probe. Furthermore, a novel data-dependent motion artifact tailoring algorithm is implemented to eliminate noisy data due to the motion artifact and measure oxygenation level with high accuracy in real time. By taking advantages of current wireless transmission and signal processing technologies, the developed wearable photoplethysmography device successfully captures the measured signals and sends them wirelessly to a mobile device for signal processing in real time. After applying motion artifact tailoring, evaluating accuracy with a continuous clinical device, the blood oxygenation measurements obtained from our system yielded an accuracy of at least 98%, when compared to a range of 93.6%-96.7% observed before from the same initial data. Additionally, heart rate accuracy above 97% was achieved. Motion artifact tailoring and removal in real time, continuous systems will allow wearable devices to be truly wearable and a reliable electrophysiological monitoring and diagnostics tool for everyday use.