Ring-type Heart Rate Sensor and Monitoring system for Sensor Network Application

As low power, low cost wireless communication technology like Bluetooth, Zigbee, RFID has been put to practical use together with the wellbeing trend, the concern about ubiquitous health care has been greatly increased and u-Health is becoming one of the most important application in the sensor network field. Especially, development of the medical services to be able to cope with a state of emergency for solitary senior citizens and the aged in silver town is very meaningful itself and their needs are also expected to continuously increase with a rapid increase in an aging population. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of extracting accurate heart rate variability (HRV) measurements from photoelectric plethysmography(PPG) signals gathered by a ring type pulse oximeter sensor attached to the finger. For this, we made 2 types of ring sensor, that is reflective and pervious type, and developed the remote monitoring system which is able to collect HR data from ring sensor, analyze and cope with a state of emergency.