Biomedical Electronic Systems to Improve the Healthcare Quality and Efficiency

Abstract

The most recent developments of electronics, informatics and telecommunications let imagine applications in the biomedical engineering field to improve the healthcare quality (She et al., 2007). In particular a number of systems has been developed in the telemedicine and home care sectors which could guarantee an efficient and reliable home assistance allowing a highly better quality of life in terms of prophylaxis, treatment and reduction of discomfort connected to periodic out–patient controls and/or hospitalization for the patients afflicted by pathologies (such as cardiac decompensation or obstructive chronic bronchopathy), and allowing considerable savings on sanitary expenses. In this chapter we present a review of our principal projects in biomedical electronic field, developed at the Electronic Device Laboratory of Polytechnic of Bari, Italy. Firstly we propose a medical electronic-computerized platform for diagnostic use, which allows the doctor to carry out a complete cardio-respiratory control on remote patients in real time. The system has been patented and has been designed to be employed also to realtime rescue in case of emergency without the necessity for data to be constantly monitored by a medical centre, leaving patients free to move. For this purpose the system has been equipped with highly developed firmware which enables automated functioning and complex decision-making. In fact, when an emergency sign is detected through the real-time diagnosing system, it sends a warning message to people able to arrange for his/her rescue. A Global Positioning System (GPS) also provides the patient coordinates. All this occurs automatically without any intervention by the user. The system might be useful also to sportsmen. Thanks to its characteristics it can help to reduce hospitalization rates and length of stays thereby improving health costs and quality of life. Moreover the system, in its version for diagnostic use, has been verified by the heart specialists of the Institute of Cardiology in the General Hospital (Polyclinic) of the University of Bari. We also propose a low-cost, electronic medical device, designed for the non-invasive continuous real-time monitoring of breathing functions. It diagnoses respiratory pathologies by the electronic three dimensional (3-D) auscultation of lung sounds, performing a correlation between lung sounds and diseases. Moreover we present a new system for acquiring simultaneously some health parameters which are strongly correlated: breathing rate and kinetic activity. The system is based on a