Guard Patch: An intelligent wearable wireless system with IoT and biosignal acquisition

The field of wearable technologies is a novel and promising emerging area that offers a number of benefits to users and healthcare professionals alike, enabling real-time monitoring of diseases, convenience and ease of use. Professor Shuenn-Yuh Lee of the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan, is immersed in this field and working on a particular project called 'Guard Patch: An intelligent wearable wireless system with IoT and biosignal acquisition'.

This area of research is becoming increasingly important given the context of a rapidly ageing population and associated considerations of the prolificacy of chronic diseases, growing awareness of cost and emphasis on the importance of health monitoring.

The Guard Patch functions using integrated circuits the researchers have developed, including a biosignal acquisition system, digital signal processing system, power management system and wireless transceiver system. The products it encompasses have a number of advantages compared to existing systems. For example, the ECG patch has a low-power SoC for wireless electrocardiogram monitoring that can be used more days without wireless and the patch length can be adjusted to fit anybody. Regarding smart clothes, it can provide more detailed biosignal monitoring than other wearable devices because it has a larger surface area in contact with the body of the user. When it comes to the portable and wireless urine detection system, the cost is lower, the product can be disposable, and can also be easily combined with integrated circuits to lower power consumption for long-term use on wearable devices. The epilepsy brain wave detection and stimulation system the team is working on includes EEG detection SoC and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) for wireless communication, enabling real-time detection, diagnosis, and stimulation to be achieved. Lastly, the team's IoT-based platform for smart wearable devices is the only platform customised for biomedical application that can use the wearable devices to detect different biosignals.