Feasibility study of an embedded platform for biopotentials acquisition during sports activities

Abstract

The application of wearable devices for monitoring purposes is an open research topic and the study of increasingly reliable platforms is becoming more and more treated and widespread in the research community due to the recent great development of the telemedicine field. A telemedicine platform based on wearable sensors could allow the reduction of the hospitalizations, the prevention of acute events in chronic patients, the monitoring of the drug therapys functioning or just an autonomous and periodic monitoring of the patients health status during daily life or sports practice. Nowadays plenty of monitoring platforms are present in the market, developed for different use cases and scenarios, but usually the design is uncomfortable for the daily usage during sport activities or the clinical relevance of the collected information is poor. In order to address these issues, in this paper we propose an innovative fully wireless embedded platform to collect multiple physiological parameters in a real-time scenario, designed to both maximise user comfort and ensure high synchronization performance between different sensor nodes. Examples of possible applications could be the assessment of the sport performance during a physical training session or the real time evaluation of athletes health status during long-term sport competitions.