In-home passive monitoring for medical applications

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a surge of in-home monitoring and sensing systems. They promise to change healthcare as we know it by continuously monitoring patients at home. Yet, despite all of the interest and effort that has gone into designing these systems, their capabilities are rudimentary and long term retention rates remain low. One of the main reasons for this is that they require the user to either wear or interact with the sensor in order to work effectively. This thesis addresses many of the challenges faced by systems today enabling novel applications in both in-home monitoring and healthcare. To overcome these challenges, this thesis introduces a novel hardware / software sensor that uses radio signals to enable patient health monitoring at home. It hangs on the wall like a picture frame and transmits low-power radio signals which reflect off of the user and return back to the device. By capturing and processing the reflected signals, physiological metrics related to mobility and vital signs can be extracted without touching the user in any way. Furthermore, it relates these health signals to symptoms of Parkinson Disease by deploying the sensor in a pilot study and comparing the health metrics to gold standard clinical assessments.