Wearable monitoring devices are now a usual commodity in the market, especially for the monitoring of sports and physical activity. However, specialized wearable devices remain an open field for high-risk professionals, such as military personnel, fire and rescue, law enforcement, etc. In this work, a prototype wearable instrument, based on reconfigurable technologies and capable of monitoring electrocardiogram, oxygen saturation, and motion, is presented. This reconfigurable device allows a wide range of applications in conjunction with mobile devices. As a proof-of-concept, the reconfigurable instrument was been integrated into ad hoc glasses, in order to illustrate the non-invasive monitoring of the user. The performance of the presented prototype was validated against a commercial pulse oximeter, while several alternatives for QRS-complex detection were tested. For this type of scenario, clustering-based classification was found to be a very robust option.
Keywords: ECG; oxygen saturation; reconfigurable instrumentation; wearable instruments.