Portable piezoelectric cardiac abnormality detection

Continuous portable monitoring system for cardiac activity is very important to keep a patient under control. This work addresses the design and realization of a Bluetooth based portable system incorporating a piezoelectric sensor sheet. When the sensor is attached to a human chest, the cardiac mechanical activity will induce a local strain in the sensor incorporated piezoelectric materials. This strain is converted to an electrical output voltage which is then collected and transmitted through the Bluetooth-based system. Piezoelectric theory and signal processing methods have been used to extract the heart rate, pulse pressure, and its corresponding period of several cycles. These parameters have been validated using conventional methods. The realized system is 50 g with a length of 5 cm, width of 3 cm and a thickness of 2 cm with biasing voltage of 3 V. Its ease of use, compactness, lightweightness, and low energy consumption will make it ideal to be utilized in a wide range of applications. In addition, this work addresses development of an efficient algorithm to detect abnormalities in cardiac activities using correlation techniques. The proposed algorithm for detecting abnormalities reduces the processing time hugely and the processing power considerably.