| Summary: | Current health care have developed a large number of sensors and measurements methodologies. Each of them in most cases dedicated for a single measurement to be made by an medical doctor or a nurse. It seams apparent that more and preciser information can be obtained if these measurements can be made under normal living conditions i.e. not at the hospital. This puts a focus to questions like mobility, ease of application, calibration and data communication. Thus issues like sensor size, weight, means of communication, field calibration, power lifetime etc. becomes extremely important. There is a long development in mobile medical monitoring/aiding technology like pace makers. Here size and power life time is feasible for patients. Communication means to the pace makers is also improved but most often requires a visit to the hospital. For much medical monitoring like blood pressure, ECG, pulse, etc. it would be beneficial to enable continuous monitoring with local on board diagnosis. The current strong research in light weight sensor nodes and sensor networks will open new perspectives to this. As an example of this I will discuss an mobile ECG development made jointly by Fraunhofer institute in Erlangen and Luleå University of Technology, EISLAB. The total device weighs less than 50g including battery. It supports Internet communication using Bluetooth connecting to the Internet via a standard mobile phone as access point. The device has on-board limited computation memory resources enabling simple local data analysis. This will reduce communication needs to "awake" messages and "alarm" messages upon which continuous data can be transfered to a medical center. This local analysis strategy will enable power life times for a 50 g sensor of many months according to first evaluations. Godkänd; 2007; 20071003 (jerker)
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