Remote monitoring of body caloric expenditure using wireless devices

The purpose of this paper was to design and develop a reliable remote monitoring system that allows health care professionals to monitor the daily calories expenditure of obese subjects. The system was implemented by using the Z430-Chronos wireless development kit and BM-CS5 wireless chest strap. These devices were used to acquire and wirelessly transfer to a PC the measured caloric expenditure for the monitored subject. The calories expenditure are computed based on heart rate, provided by the chest strap, and accelerometer data acquired with CMA3000-D01 tri-axial accelerometer sensor from eZ430-Chronos watch. A graphic user interface was designed and implemented by using the LabWindows/CVI environment in order to display the temporal waveform of the daily caloric balance for the selected subject. The implemented system was tested on a group of seven obese subjects during a 90 days study. They were required to do daily physical exercises, being monitored by the described system, followed by the estimation of calories expenditure used in determining their daily caloric balance computed as difference between calories intake and the sum of calories expenditure and basal metabolic rate. The evolution of the subjects was quantified by using the biochemical parameters determined at the beginning and at the end of the days study. The difference of the biochemical results for each subject showed improvements by the lowering of high risk parameters: HDL-cholesterol, glucose, insulin.