Abstract
There exists a need to remotely monitor fully mobile patients in their natural environments. Monitoring a patient’s biological waveforms can track a patient’s vital signs or facilitate the diagnosis of a disease, which could then be treated to help prolong and/or improve the subject’s life. If a patient must be monitored without the delay associated with delivering data stored on a recording device, biotelemetry is necessary. Biotelemetry entails transmitting biological waveforms to a remote site for recording, processing and analysis. Due to the limitations of the currently popular methods of biotelemetry, this thesis proposes the use of the increasingly prevalent cellular phone system. An adaptor design is developed to facilitate biotelemetry utilizing the most common features of a cell phone, barring the need for cell phone modification, as required for affordability. As cell phones notoriously confound sensitive medical equipment, especially patient-connected devices, their use is often distanced from sensitive equipment. However, the desire to use cell phones to transmit biological waveforms requires their joint-proximity to patient-connected devices. The adaptor must amplify the waveforms while rejecting cell phone interference to achieve an adequate signal-to-noise ratio. As the frequency range of most biological data does not conform to the passband of the phone system, the adapter must modulate the biological data. To limit the adapter’s size and weight, this design exploits the cell phone’s battery power. Methods are also introduced to receive and reconstruct high-fidelity representations of the original biological waveform.
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