Intel Edison on guard of health. Experience "FRUIT MD"

So, the time has come to give an answer to the little riddle given in the Skolkovo post : why does a girl of a sporty appearance train next to the Intel pavilion? The answer, however, is very simple. On white clothes black belts are well visible. These are the sensors of the mobile health diagnostics system, created on the basis of the Intel Edison microcomputer by the specialists of FRUKT MD . The complex collects vital signs of the human body and sends them to the "cloud" for storage and analysis. On the prototype of the system, which shows how health monitoring will look in the near future, says the technical director of "FRUIT MD" Maxim Yatskovsky .

The prototype shown at Startup Village in Skolkovo consisted of the following components:

1. Medical sensor attached to our "patient";
2. Intel Edison module, acting as a gateway that collects and processes data from sensors and interacts with the "cloud";
3. LTE modem to avoid surprises in the local WiFi;
4. Cloud platform for mobile health diagnostics;
5. Web interface platform.

Currently, Intel Edison software can already work with the following types of medical devices:

• Electrocardiograph (for 1 and 3 leads)
• Pulse oximeter
• HR sensor (heart rate monitor)
• Blood pressure meter
• Blood glucose meter
• Libra

If you consider only the types of devices, if you count specific models, then 13 different devices are now supported. In the near future, we are going to translate the maximum of the list of drivers implemented for other platforms, and this is already more than 50.

For communication, both normal Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE are used, and in fact, for each device model you need to write your own unique driver. And do not save any specifications GATT profiles, because manufacturers sin a significant deviation from the standard, and sometimes very surprising. In addition to medical devices, the system can work with accelerometers, iBeacon and environmental sensors, because in order to understand what is happening with a person, it is often necessary to know not only his pulse, but also in what conditions a person is and what is happening around him.
In the demonstration device at the Village, the Zephyr BH-3 sensor, although not very new, acted as a sensor, allowing you to simultaneously receive a single-channel ECG, pulse, respiration rate and data from accelerometers. By the way, it was very interesting to test the system in extreme radio conditions when hundreds of people walk around with Wi-Fi and Bluetooh turned on, and according to the results it should be noted that the radio part on Edison behaved very decently, which is good news.


Zephyr BH-3 sensor
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Inside Edison, most of the logic is implemented on node.js, including working with devices. Algorithms for processing and analyzing biosignals (primarily ECG) are written in C ++ and are connected as binary modules in order to avoid performance bottlenecks. With this architecture, Edison is free to work with 6 simultaneous ECG streams with a sampling frequency of 500 Hz. The amount of memory occupied by the process rarely exceeds 100 MB. The high-resolution ECG has not yet been verified, due to the lack of instruments at the moment, but according to preliminary estimates this will not be a ceiling for the system.

There probably need to be a little distracted and note that the sensors can be divided into 2 large categories: those that transmit some measured number, for example weight or blood pressure, and those that receive a continuous signal, such as an electrocardiogram and a pulse wave with a pulse oximeter. And if in the first case the use of productive platforms is not strongly justified, by and large there is no need for special computing resources, in the second case a simple controller is no longer enough.
Anticipating the questions "Why not take the Raspberry Pi or something similar and not do the same?", You can answer that yes, with the selected software architecture, you can freely transfer the code to it, but as a result we will not get what we can call product. You need to add a Bluetooth 4.0 module, it is very desirable to work stably and with a good range, which is not the case in most of these boards, you need to make a compact case, in some cases provide autonomous power, etc. ... As a result, we have a difference of no more than a couple of tens of dollars larger size and number of components and, accordingly, reduced reliability and, by the way, increased energy consumption.

Interaction with the cloud is not something extraordinary, implemented through its own REST API. The biosignals are buffered by the gateway and transmitted on average every 500 ms. This timeout can adapt to the characteristics of the transmission channel. In the event of a connection failure, as soon as possible, all measurements are sent to the server. If necessary, the stream can be compressed by the standard gzip algorithm. Single measurement data is transmitted immediately. Further, biosignals are re-processed if necessary, and become available in the web interface of the system. The total signal delay from the moment of removal to the moment of output in the interface is 1-2 seconds and can be reduced if necessary.


ECG monitoring interface

Well, a little about the "cloud" - its main goal is not so much just to collect data and save it, as to provide a preliminary diagnosis of a person's health, to identify trends in changing health. For this purpose, various tools are used, ranging from conventional algorithms aimed at identifying specific diseases, for example, various arrhythmias, when the heart beats irregularly, and revealing a change in the trend parameters, including in conjunction with what happens to a person (for example, Blood pressure can be affected by air temperature, atmospheric pressure, or even the presence of a person for a while in a Starbucks room :)).


Pressure monitoring interface

The Cloud uses both the above-described gateway and applications for smartphones, external services as data sources (for example, it can obtain weather data or import measurement results from Basis watches or Fitbit pedometers and the like). Since this is a medical system, the health of data sources is monitored to warn of a discharging battery in the sensor or a disconnected gateway, it is possible to work with impersonal data to ensure the privacy of often very sensitive information, or alternatively, especially in light of recent laws, it allows you to store personal information in the jurisdiction of the country to which the person belongs.

And now, probably, the main questions “Why?” And “Who needs it?” - the application of this solution can be divided into three categories:

1. In the hospital to monitor patients not in acute conditions. The gateway can either move with the patient (due to the small size), or a network of gateways can be deployed that “track” the movement of the patient with the sensor. In this variant, the prompt response to the emergence of health problems is just very important. Unfortunately, for many hospitals we have this topic is not for the present, but let's hope ...
2. As a home system of the so-called “health monitoring,” when the gateway either continuously removes the same ECG, it also receives data from a blood pressure monitor, blood glucose meter, or other devices. An alternative to the gateway can serve as a smartphone, but the realities of technology are such that it is now impossible to ensure continuous monitoring of the ECG for more than a dozen hours if you do not put the smartphone on charge, and here we have a separate device in which you can be confident and whose performance is constantly monitored.
3. For healthy people, well, or underdone :). When playing sports, both in usual fitness centers, and professional. ECG monitoring, and not just the pulse, provides many interesting possibilities. And, by the way, the gateway in this case can serve not 1 but several people at the same time.

Yes, unfortunately, at this stage, our medicine is not yet ready for the mass use of such devices, although it, in general, is already quite ready for real use. However, the fact that “FRUIT MD” received state support in the face of the Skolkovo Foundation inspires certain hopes. And Intel will not rust out - new compact computers will be even more productive, more economical, smaller and more convenient to use.