People living with cognitive disabilities, like dementia and mental illness, are predisposed to suffer from severe spontaneous feelings of anxiety, fear, and depression; however, these traumatic events are often hidden from their caregivers. This is especially true in underserved communities, where access to expensive clinical care is limited.
These changes in cognitive state lead to sympathetic arousals that alter cardiac mechanics, but traditional electronics are not suited to monitor these changes for long durations because of obtrusive wires, poor mechanical coupling between rigid sensors and the body, skin irritation, and awkward device placements.
Here, we report a novel IoT system consisting of a soft sternal patch with optimized mechanics capable of wirelessly monitoring the minute mechanical vibrations on the chest caused by each heartbeat, an android app that conducts real time signal processing and machine learning to identify markers of cognitive stress, and a caregiver device that receives critical updates into patient wellbeing.
This system is a marked improvement over traditional methods, which either involve obtrusive wired monitoring or imprecise written surveys or subjective caregiver evaluations because it provides continuous monitoring of objective physiological manifestations of cognitive stress.
In addition, the fundamental studies into integrated electronics presented here are widely applicable to wireless monitoring of many cardiac heart states, and this will form the basis for further investigations.