Design and implementation of Internet of Things for emergency medical devices based on cloud-edge-device architecture / 生物医学工程学杂志

Internet of Things (IoT) technology plays an important role in smart healthcare. This paper discusses IoT solution for emergency medical devices in hospitals. Based on the cloud-edge-device architecture, different medical devices were connected; Streaming data were parsed, distributed, and computed at the edge nodes; Data were stored, analyzed and visualized in the cloud nodes. The IoT system has been working steadily for nearly 20 months since it run in the emergency department in January 2021. Through preliminary analysis with collected data, IoT performance testing and development of early warning model, the feasibility and reliability of the in-hospital emergency medical devices IoT was verified, which can collect data for a long time on a large scale and support the development and deployment of machine learning models. The paper ends with an outlook on medical device data exchange and wireless transmission in the IoT of emergency medical devices, the connection of emergency equipment inside and outside the hospital, and the next step of analyzing IoT data to develop emergency intelligent IoT applications.

A wearable six-minute walk-based system to predict postoperative pulmonary complications after cardiac valve surgery: an exploratory study / 生物医学工程学杂志

In recent years, wearable devices have seen a booming development, and the integration of wearable devices with clinical settings is an important direction in the development of wearable devices. The purpose of this study is to establish a prediction model for postoperative pulmonary complications (PPCs) by continuously monitoring respiratory physiological parameters of cardiac valve surgery patients during the preoperative 6-Minute Walk Test (6MWT) with a wearable device. By enrolling 53 patients with cardiac valve diseases in the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, the grouping was based on the presence or absence of PPCs in the postoperative period. The 6MWT continuous respiratory physiological parameters collected by the SensEcho wearable device were analyzed, and the group differences in respiratory parameters and oxygen saturation parameters were calculated, and a prediction model was constructed. The results showed that continuous monitoring of respiratory physiological parameters in 6MWT using a wearable device had a better predictive trend for PPCs in cardiac valve surgery patients, providing a novel reference model for integrating wearable devices with the clinic.

Exploratory study on quantitative analysis of nocturnal breathing patterns in patients with acute heart failure based on wearable devices / 生物医学工程学杂志

Patients with acute heart failure (AHF) often experience dyspnea, and monitoring and quantifying their breathing patterns can provide reference information for disease and prognosis assessment. In this study, 39 AHF patients and 24 healthy subjects were included. Nighttime chest-abdominal respiratory signals were collected using wearable devices, and the differences in nocturnal breathing patterns between the two groups were quantitatively analyzed. Compared with the healthy group, the AHF group showed a higher mean breathing rate (BR_mean) [(21.03 ± 3.84) beat/min vs. (15.95 ± 3.08) beat/min, P < 0.001], and larger R_RSBI_cv [70.96% (54.34%-104.28)% vs. 58.48% (45.34%-65.95)%, P = 0.005], greater AB_ratio_cv [(22.52 ± 7.14)% vs. (17.10 ± 6.83)%, P = 0.004], and smaller SampEn (0.67 ± 0.37 vs. 1.01 ± 0.29, P < 0.001). Additionally, the mean inspiratory time (TI_mean) and expiration time (TE_mean) were shorter, TI_cv and TE_cv were greater. Furthermore, the LBI_cv was greater, while SD1 and SD2 on the Poincare plot were larger in the AHF group, all of which showed statistically significant differences. Logistic regression calibration revealed that the TI_mean reduction was a risk factor for AHF. The BR_ mean demonstrated the strongest ability to distinguish between the two groups, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.846. Parameters such as breathing period, amplitude, coordination, and nonlinear parameters effectively quantify abnormal breathing patterns in AHF patients. Specifically, the reduction in TI_mean serves as a risk factor for AHF, while the BR_mean distinguishes between the two groups. These findings have the potential to provide new information for the assessment of AHF patients.

Development of intelligent monitoring system based on Internet of Things and wearable technology and exploration of its clinical application mode / 生物医学工程学杂志

Wearable monitoring, which has the advantages of continuous monitoring for a long time with low physiological and psychological load, represents a future development direction of monitoring technology. Based on wearable physiological monitoring technology, combined with Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence technology, this paper has developed an intelligent monitoring system, including wearable hardware, ward Internet of Things platform, continuous physiological data analysis algorithm and software. We explored the clinical value of continuous physiological data using this system through a lot of clinical practices. And four value points were given, namely, real-time monitoring, disease assessment, prediction and early warning, and rehabilitation training. Depending on the real clinical environment, we explored the mode of applying wearable technology in general ward monitoring, cardiopulmonary rehabilitation, and integrated monitoring inside and outside the hospital. The research results show that this monitoring system can be effectively used for monitoring of patients in hospital, evaluation and training of patients' cardiopulmonary function, and management of patients outside hospital.

Wearable devices: Perspectives on assessing and monitoring human physiological status / 生物医学工程学杂志

This review article aims to explore the major challenges that the healthcare system is currently facing and propose a new paradigm shift that harnesses the potential of wearable devices and novel theoretical frameworks on health and disease. Lifestyle-induced diseases currently account for a significant portion of all healthcare spending, with this proportion projected to increase with population aging. Wearable devices have emerged as a key technology for implementing large-scale healthcare systems focused on disease prevention and management. Advancements in miniaturized sensors, system integration, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, 5G, and other technologies have enabled wearable devices to perform high-quality measurements comparable to medical devices. Through various physical, chemical, and biological sensors, wearable devices can continuously monitor physiological status information in a non-invasive or minimally invasive way, including electrocardiography, electroencephalography, respiration, blood oxygen, blood pressure, blood glucose, activity, and more. Furthermore, by combining concepts and methods from complex systems and nonlinear dynamics, we developed a novel theory of continuous dynamic physiological signal analysis-dynamical complexity. The results of dynamic signal analyses can provide crucial information for disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and management. Wearable devices can also serve as an important bridge connecting doctors and patients by tracking, storing, and sharing patient data with medical institutions, enabling remote or real-time health assessments of patients, and providing a basis for precision medicine and personalized treatment. Wearable devices have a promising future in the healthcare field and will be an important driving force for the transformation of the healthcare system, while also improving the health experience for individuals.

Effect of acute hypoxemia on central venous pressure in patients with respiratory failure / 中国医师杂志

Objective:To examine the influence of acute hypoxemia on central venous pressure (CVP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) in critical patients assisted by mechanical ventilation.Methods:We retrospectively analyzed the clinical data of critical patients assisted by mechanical ventilation in Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care Ⅲ (MIMIC-Ⅲ) database. Influence of acute hypoxemia on CVP and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) were evaluated. Hypoxemia was defined according to oxygenation index (OI) (OI≤100 as severe, 100<OI≤200 as moderate). Two cutoff values were set at OI=100 and OI=200. The primary outcomes were the difference between mean CVP, mean DBP 6 hours after the onset of hypoxemia and 6 hours before the event.Results:Among all critical patients assisted by mechanical ventilation, 508 patients met criteria of severe hypoxemia, and 1 117 patients met criteria of moderate hypoxemia. After adjusting positive expiratory end pressure (PEEP) and heart rate by multiple linear regression, CVP in patients with moderate and severe hypoxia increased significantly during the observation window of acute hypoxemia ( P=0.04, 0.02), but DBP did not change significantly ( P=0.29, 0.31). Conclusions:Acute hypoxemia could increase CVP and probably pulmonary circulation resistance in respiratory failure patients.

A study to identify obstructive sleep apnea syndrome based on 24 h ambulatory blood pressure data / 生物医学工程学杂志

Sleep apnea causes cardiac arrest, sleep rhythm disorders, nocturnal hypoxia and abnormal blood pressure fluctuations in patients, which eventually lead to nocturnal target organ damage in hypertensive patients. The incidence of obstructive sleep apnea hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) is extremely high, which seriously affects the physical and mental health of patients. This study attempts to extract features associated with OSAHS from 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure data and identify OSAHS by machine learning models for the differential diagnosis of this disease. The study data were obtained from ambulatory blood pressure examination data of 339 patients collected in outpatient clinics of the Chinese PLA General Hospital from December 2018 to December 2019, including 115 patients with OSAHS diagnosed by polysomnography (PSG) and 224 patients with non-OSAHS. Based on the characteristics of clinical changes of blood pressure in OSAHS patients, feature extraction rules were defined and algorithms were developed to extract features, while logistic regression and lightGBM models were then used to classify and predict the disease. The results showed that the identification accuracy of the lightGBM model trained in this study was 80.0%, precision was 82.9%, recall was 72.5%, and the area under the working characteristic curve (AUC) of the subjects was 0.906. The defined ambulatory blood pressure features could be effectively used for identifying OSAHS. This study provides a new idea and method for OSAHS screening.

Investigation on new paradigm of clinical physiological monitoring by using wearable devices / 生物医学工程学杂志

As a low-load physiological monitoring technology, wearable devices can provide new methods for monitoring, evaluating and managing chronic diseases, which is a direction for the future development of monitoring technology. However, as a new type of monitoring technology, its clinical application mode and value are still unclear and need to be further explored. In this study, a central monitoring system based on wearable devices was built in the general ward (non-ICU ward) of PLA General Hospital, the value points of clinical application of wearable physiological monitoring technology were analyzed, and the system was combined with the treatment process and applied to clinical monitoring. The system is able to effectively collect data such as electrocardiogram, respiration, blood oxygen, pulse rate, and body position/movement to achieve real-time monitoring, prediction and early warning, and condition assessment. And since its operation from March 2018, 1 268 people (657 patients) have undergone wearable continuous physiological monitoring until January 2020, with data from a total of 1 198 people (632 cases) screened for signals through signal quality algorithms and manual interpretation were available for analysis, accounting for 94.48 % (96.19%) of the total. Through continuous physiological data analysis and manual correction, sleep apnea event, nocturnal hypoxemia, tachycardia, and ventricular premature beats were detected in 232 (36.65%), 58 (9.16%), 30 (4.74%), and 42 (6.64%) of the total patients, while the number of these abnormal events recorded in the archives was 4 (0.63%), 0 (0.00%), 24 (3.80%), and 15 (2.37%) cases. The statistical analysis of sleep apnea event outcomes revealed that patients with chronic diseases were more likely to have sleep apnea events than healthy individuals, and the incidence was higher in men (62.93%) than in women (37.07%). The results indicate that wearable physiological monitoring technology can provide a new monitoring mode for inpatients, capturing more abnormal events and provide richer information for clinical diagnosis and treatment through continuous physiological parameter analysis, and can be effectively integrated into existing medical processes. We will continue to explore the applicability of this new monitoring mode in different clinical scenarios to further enrich the clinical application of wearable technology and provide richer tools and methods for the monitoring, evaluation and management of chronic diseases.

Research progress on wearable physiological parameter monitoring and its clinical applications / 生物医学工程学杂志

Wearable physiological parameter monitoring devices play an increasingly important role in daily health monitoring and disease diagnosis/treatment due to their continuous dynamic and low physiological/psychological load characteristics. After decades of development, wearable technologies have gradually matured, and research has expanded to clinical applications. This paper reviews the research progress of wearable physiological parameter monitoring technology and its clinical applications. Firstly, it introduces wearable physiological monitoring technology's research progress in terms of sensing technology and data processing and analysis. Then, it analyzes the monitoring physiological parameters and principles of current medical-grade wearable devices and proposes three specific directions of clinical application research: 1) real-time monitoring and predictive warning, 2) disease assessment and differential diagnosis, and 3) rehabilitation training and precision medicine. Finally, the challenges and response strategies of wearable physiological monitoring technology in the biomedical field are discussed, highlighting its clinical application value and clinical application mode to provide helpful reference information for the research of wearable technology-related fields.

Study on the quality evaluation of electrocardiogram signal in wearable physiological monitoring system / 生物医学工程学杂志

As a novel technology, wearable physiological parameter monitoring technology represents the future of monitoring technology. However, there are still many problems in the application of this kind of technology. In this paper, a pilot study was conducted to evaluate the quality of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals of the wearable physiological monitoring system (SensEcho-5B). Firstly, an evaluation algorithm of ECG signal quality was developed based on template matching method, which was used for automatic and quantitative evaluation of ECG signals. The algorithm performance was tested on a randomly selected 100 h dataset of ECG signals from 100 subjects (15 healthy subjects and 85 patients with cardiovascular diseases). On this basis, 24-hour ECG data of 30 subjects (7 healthy subjects and 23 patients with cardiovascular diseases) were collected synchronously by SensEcho-5B and ECG Holter. The evaluation algorithm was used to evaluate the quality of ECG signals recorded synchronously by the two systems. Algorithm validation results: sensitivity was 100%, specificity was 99.51%, and accuracy was 99.99%. Results of controlled test of 30 subjects: the median (Q1, Q3) of ECG signal detected by SensEcho-5B with poor signal quality time was 8.93 (0.84, 32.53) minutes, and the median (Q1, Q3) of ECG signal detected by Holter with poor signal quality time was 14.75 (4.39, 35.98) minutes (Rank sum test,

Quantitative analysis of breathing patterns based on wearable systems / 生物医学工程学杂志

Breathing pattern parameters refer to the characteristic pattern parameters of respiratory movements, including the breathing amplitude and cycle, chest and abdomen contribution, coordination, etc. It is of great importance to analyze the breathing pattern parameters quantificationally when exploring the pathophysiological variations of breathing and providing instructions on pulmonary rehabilitation training. Our study provided detailed method to quantify breathing pattern parameters including respiratory rate, inspiratory time, expiratory time, inspiratory time proportion, tidal volume, chest respiratory contribution ratio, thoracoabdominal phase difference and peak inspiratory flow. We also brought in "respiratory signal quality index" to deal with the quality evaluation and quantification analysis of long-term thoracic-abdominal respiratory movement signal recorded, and proposed the way of analyzing the variance of breathing pattern parameters. On this basis, we collected chest and abdomen respiratory movement signals in 23 chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients and 22 normal pulmonary function subjects under spontaneous state in a 15 minute-interval using portable cardio-pulmonary monitoring system. We then quantified subjects' breathing pattern parameters and variability. The results showed great difference between the COPD patients and the controls in terms of respiratory rate, inspiratory time, expiratory time, thoracoabdominal phase difference and peak inspiratory flow. COPD patients also showed greater variance of breathing pattern parameters than the controls, and unsynchronized thoracic-abdominal movements were even observed among several patients. Therefore, the quantification and analyzing method of breathing pattern parameters based on the portable cardiopulmonary parameters monitoring system might assist the diagnosis and assessment of respiratory system diseases and hopefully provide new parameters and indexes for monitoring the physical status of patients with cardiopulmonary disease.

Study on the accuracy of cardiopulmonary physiological measurements by a wearable physiological monitoring system under different activity conditions / 生物医学工程学杂志

This paper aims to study the accuracy of cardiopulmonary physiological parameters measurement under different exercise intensity in the accompanying (wearable) physiological parameter monitoring system. SensEcho, an accompanying physiological parameter monitoring system, and CORTEX METALYZER 3B, a cardiopulmonary function testing system, were used to simultaneously collect the cardiopulmonary physiological parameters of 28 healthy volunteers (17 males and 11 females) in various exercise states, such as standing, lying down and Bruce treadmill exercise. Bland-Altman analysis, correlation analysis and other methods, from the perspective of group and individual, were used to contrast and analyze the two types of equipment to measure parameters of heart rate and breathing rate. The results of group analysis showed that the heart rate and respiratory rate data box charts collected by the two devices were highly consistent. The heart rate difference was (-0.407 ± 3.380) times/min, and the respiratory rate difference was (-0.560 ± 7.047) times/min. The difference was very small. The Bland-Altman plot of the heart rate and respiratory rate in each experimental stage showed that the proportion of mean ± 2SD was 96.86% and 95.29%, respectively. The results of individual analysis showed that the correlation coefficients of the whole-process heart rate and respiratory rate data were all greater than 0.9. In conclusion, SensEcho, as an accompanying physiological parameter monitoring system, can accurately measure the human heart rate, respiration rate and other key cardiopulmonary physiological parameters under various sports conditions. It can maintain good stability under various sports conditions and meet the requirements of continuous physiological signal collection and analysis application under sports conditions.

Construction of multi-parameter emergency database and preliminary application research / 生物医学工程学杂志

The analysis of big data in medical field cannot be isolated from the high quality clinical database, and the construction of first aid database in our country is still in the early stage of exploration. This paper introduces the idea and key technology of the construction of multi-parameter first aid database. By combining emergency business flow with information flow, an emergency data integration model was designed with reference to the architecture of the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III), created by Computational Physiology Laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a high-quality first-aid database was built. The database currently covers 22 941 medical records for 19 814 different patients from May 2015 to October 2017, including relatively complete information on physiology, biochemistry, treatment, examination, nursing, etc. And based on the database, the first First-Aid Big Data Datathon event, which 13 teams from all over the country participated in, was launched. The First-Aid database provides a reference for the construction and application of clinical database in China. And it could provide powerful data support for scientific research, clinical decision making and the improvement of medical quality, which will further promote secondary analysis of clinical data in our country.

Design and preliminary validation of a ubiquitous and wearable physiological monitoring system / 生物医学工程学杂志

To achieve continuously physiological monitoring on hospital inpatients, a ubiquitous and wearable physiological monitoring system SensEcho was developed. The whole system consists of three parts: a wearable physiological monitoring unit, a wireless network and communication unit and a central monitoring system. The wearable physiological monitoring unit is an elastic shirt with respiratory inductive plethysmography sensor and textile electrocardiogram (ECG) electrodes embedded in, to collect physiological signals of ECG, respiration and posture/activity continuously and ubiquitously. The wireless network and communication unit is based on WiFi networking technology to transmit data from each physiological monitoring unit to the central monitoring system. A protocol of multiple data re-transmission and data integrity verification was implemented to reduce packet dropouts during the wireless communication. The central monitoring system displays data collected by the wearable system from each inpatient and monitors the status of each patient. An architecture of data server and algorithm server was established, supporting further data mining and analysis for big medical data. The performance of the whole system was validated. Three kinds of tests were conducted: validation of physiological monitoring algorithms, reliability of the monitoring system on volunteers, and reliability of data transmission. The results show that the whole system can achieve good performance in both physiological monitoring and wireless data transmission. The application of this system in clinical settings has the potential to establish a new model for individualized hospital inpatients monitoring, and provide more precision medicine to the patients with information derived from the continuously collected physiological parameters.

Big data in emergency and clinical decision support system / 中华危重病急救医学

Medical big data is a hot research topic in China,and it is also the main research direction in the field of emergency medicine.The current situation of the construction of the first-aid big data platform and the construction of the first-aid clinical decision support system were analyzed,the problems existing in the development of the first-aid big data research field were enumerated,to explore the theoretical methods for promoting the development of domestic first-aid big data,so as to provide references for the research in related fields.

Pilot research: construction of emergency rescue database / 中华危重病急救医学

Objective To construct a database containing multiple kinds of diseases that can provide "real world"data for first-aid clinical research. Methods Structured or non-structured information from hospital information system, laboratory information system, emergency medical system, emergency nursing system and bedside monitoring instruments of patients who visited department of emergency in PLA General Hospital from January 2014 to January 2018 were extracted. Database was created by forms, code writing, and data process. Results Emergency Rescue Database is a single center database established by PLA General Hospital. The information was collected from the patients who had visited the emergency department in PLA General Hospital since January 2014 to January 2018. The database included 530 585 patients' information of triage and 22 941 patients' information of treatment in critical rescue room, including information related to human demography, triage, medical records, vital signs, lab tests, image and biological examinations and so on. There were 12 tables (PATIENTS, TRIAGE_PATIENTS, EMG_PATIENTS_VISIT, VITAL_SIGNS, CHARTEVENTS, MEDICAL_ORDER, MEDICAL_RECORD, NURSING_RECORD, LAB_TEST_MASTER, LAB_RESULT, MEDICAL_EXAMINATION, EMG_INOUT_RECORD) that containing different kinds of patients' information. Conclusions The setup of high quality emergency databases lay solid ground for scientific researches based on data. The model of constructing Emergency Rescue Database could be the reference for other medical institutions to build multiple-diseases databases.

A cross-disciplinary collaborative "Datathon" model to promote the application of medical big data / 中华危重病急救医学

Medical practice generates and stores immense amounts of clinical process data, while integrating and utilization of these data requires interdisciplinary cooperation together with novel models and methods to further promote applications of medical big data and research of artificial intelligence. A "Datathon" model is a novel event of data analysis and is typically organized as intense, short-duration, competitions in which participants with various knowledge and skills cooperate to address clinical questions based on "real world" data. This article introduces the origin of Datathon, organization of the events and relevant practice. The Datathon approach provides innovative solutions to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration and new methods for conducting research of big data in healthcare. It also offers insight into teaming up multi-expertise experts to investigate relevant clinical questions and further accelerate the application of medical big data.

Big data in emergency medcine and Datathon event / 中华危重病急救医学

A detailed, high-scale clinical data can be generated in the process of diagnosis and treatment of emergency critically ill patients. The integration and analysis and utilization of these data are of great value for improving the treatment level and efficiency and developing the data-driven clinical assistant decision support. China has large volume of health information resources, however, the construction of healthcare databases and subsequent secondary analysis has just started. With the effort of the Chinese PLA General Hospital in building an emergency database and promoting data sharing, the first emergency database was published in China and a health Datathon was organized utilizing this database, providing experience for clinical data integration, database construction, cross-disciplinary collaboration and data sharing. Referring to the development at home and abroad, this review discussed work in this area and further proposed establishing a big data cooperation for emergency medicine and building a learning healthcare system to integrate more clinical resources and form a closed loop of "clinical database construction-analysis-applications", and enhance the effectiveness of medical big data in reducing medical costs and improving healthcare delivery.

Analysis of diseases distribution in Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care Ⅲ database / 中华危重病急救医学

Objective To study the distribution of diseases in Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care Ⅲ(MIMIC-Ⅲ) database in order to provide reference for clinicians and engineers who use MIMIC-Ⅲ database to solve clinical research problems. Methods The exploratory data analysis technologies were used to explore the distribution characteristics of diseases and emergencies of patients (excluding newborns) in MIMIC-Ⅲ database were explored; then, neonatal gestational age, weight, length of hospital stay in intensive care unit (ICU) were analyzed with the same method. Results In the MIMIC-Ⅲ database, 46 428 patients were admitted for the first time, and 49 214 ICU records were recorded. There were 26 076 males and 20 352 females; the median age was 60.5 (38.6, 75.6) years, and most patients were between 60 and 80 years old. The first diagnosis in the disease spectrum analysis was firstly ranked by circulatory diseases (32%), followed by injury and poisoning (14%), digestive system disease (8%), tumor (7%), respiratory disease (6%) and so on. Patients with ischemic heart disease accounted for the largest proportion of circulatory disease (42%), the proportion of these patients gradually increased with age of 60-70 years old, then decreased. However, the proportion of patients with cerebrovascular disease declined first and then increased with age, which was the main cause of death of circulatory system disease (ICU mortality was 22.5%). Injury and poisoning patients showed a significant decrease with age. Digestive system diseases were younger than the general population (most people aged between 50 to 60 years), and non-infectious enteritis and colitis were the main causes of death (ICU mortality was 18.3%). Respiratory infections were predominant in infected patients (34%), but circulatory system infections were the main cause of death (ICU mortality was 25.6%). Secondly, in the neonatal care unit, premature infants accounted for the vast majority (82%). As the gestational age increased, the duration of ICU was decreased, and the mortality was decreased. Conclusions The diseases distribution of patients can be provided by MIMIC-Ⅲ database, which helps to grasp the overview of the volume and age distribution of the target patients in advance, and carry out the next step of research. Meanwhile, it points out the important role of exploratory data analysis in electronic health records analysis.

Design of ECG signal acquisition system based on MSP430 microcontroller / 医疗卫生装备

Objective To design a high performance and low power consumption ECG signal acquisition system which can meet the demand for long time monitoring of the physiological status of patients.Methods The prototype system utilized low power ECG analog front end ADAS1000 and MSP430F5529 microcontroller to achieve configuration of AFE and back-reading of ECG data by SPI bus. Results This system implemented 24-hour dynamic ECG monitoring of patients in active state, and the data acquired were accurate and reliable.Conclusion The system realizes PCB integration, low power consumption, and can be used for battery powered portable application such as wearable devices.