Wearable devices and their applications in surgical robot control and p-medicine

摘要

Wearable sensors have broad applications in many areas. For biomedical applications, they are being actively adopted for human-machine interactive control or health monitoring purposes. This study gives two examples of applying wearable sensors for these biomedical applications by utilizing information from sensor-human-machine interaction and multi-modal sensing. The first example demonstrated the intuitive control of the motions of surgical robots by human arms and hands movements in free space using electromyogram and acceleration measurements. The other one conducted a 20-hour continuous monitoring of multi-modal physiological signals in real life settings using multiple wearable sensors. After automatically removing the motion artifacts from the ambulatory data, median to strong dependence were found between some common cardiovascular parameters (heart rate and pulse amplitude) and the condition of the subject during measurements (psychological status and physical activity level). This study provides the insight that ambulatory monitoring of physiological variables in daily life settings should be interpreted with cautions, and contextual information are needed to standardize the measurement conditions and to get more accurate and reproducible results for better clinical decisions.