Pervasive sensing has rapidly grown over the last decade to provide more accurate and reliable measurements with advanced on node data analysis. Already adapted in many fields, such as communication, transportation and the food industry, pervasive sensing has enabled a new industry revolution, from production, logistics to management and marketing forecast. Pervasive sensing is also considered a suitable technical approach to tackle the growing demand on health care services. From hospital and home care to everyday wear, pervasive sensing has the potential to provide continuous monitoring of vital signs, assist in the diagnosis of pathologies and early detect exacerbations in chronic diseases. Specifically to hospitals, continuous monitoring with connected devices can assist the clinical staff and reduce their workload by alarming them only when abnormalities are detected. Currently, there is a limited number of connected monitoring devices used in the clinical setting that provide continuous monitoring at bed side.
This research proposes a platform which integrates connected wearable devices to provide continuous measurements of blood flow and perfusion parameters. The platform also allows ubiquitous and real time access to contextual information deduced from the measurements with a designed mobile application and an online server. It aims to provide continuous monitoring of tissue oxygen saturation (StO2) and arterial pulse (AP) to assist the clinical team in decision making and allow them to observe blood flow and perfusion evolution. The platform was tested on healthy volunteer humans, animals and patients in a clinical study for the application of postoperative free tissue transfer (FTT) monitoring performed for breast reconstruction following mastectomy. The results show the integrated platform and the wearable devices provide accurate and reliable measurements, independently to the patients anthropometric details and its environment, while ergonomically fitting in the clinical setting. An additional clinical translation was carried using the platform as a training tool for objective monitoring of the evolution of microsurgical skills in the case of vascular repair tasks.