Embedded microphone array for E-health monitoring

• Main Authors: Ser, Wee, Zhang, Jianmin, Peck, Cheng Wee
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Research Report
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Control and instrumentation::Medical electronics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/14513
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The objective of this project is to design a wearable microphone array system that can be used to monitor the health condition of human from the breathing sound generated by the human wearing it. This is part of a bigger program (EHS II) driven under an A*STAR Thematic Strategic Research Program (which aims to develop wearable technologies for healthcare monitoring purposes). The work recorded in this report includes the conduct of an analysis of the sound signals generated by human for healthcare monitoring applications. In particular, the properties of the normal breathing sound and that of the wheezes have been studied. The findings obtained imply that the sampling rate of the microphone array based monitoring system can be designed to be lower than 2 kHz. The system is designed to comprise three main modules: sensor (microphone array), signal processing at the Node, and signal processing at PDA. The GUI has also been designed and implemented. With the wearable constraints, a 4- microphone end-fire based beamforming design has been proposed. A large increase in the white noise gain has been shown to be possible when a suitable constrained beamforming algorithm is used for this design. The concept-proofing demonstration system has been implemented and shown to the International Review Panel (formed by A*STAR TSRP on EHS II) in 2007.