Smart-Cuff: A wearable bio-sensing platform with activity-sensitive information quality assessment for monitoring ankle edema

Leg swelling produced by retention of fluid in leg tissues is known as peripheral edema, which is regarded as a symptom for various systematic diseases such as heart or kidney failure. In current clinical practice, edema is manually assessed by clinical experts. Such an assessment can often be inaccurate and unreliable especially if it is made by different operators at different times. Despite the importance of monitoring edema for the purpose of evaluating the course of disease or the effect of treatment, quantifying peripheral edema in a continuous and accurate fashion has remained a challenge. In this paper, we propose a wearable real-time platform (namely, Smart-Cuff), which integrates advanced technologies in sensing, computation, and signal processing and machine learning for continuous and real-time edema monitoring in remote and in-home settings. Given that peripheral edema is highly dependent on various contextual attributes such as body posture, we present an activity-sensitive approach to discard erroneous or contextually invalid sensor data in order to meet the requirements of both energy efficiency and quality of information. Examination of our hardware prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed force-sensitive resistor-based edema sensor (with an R² of 0.97 for our regression model) as well as the activity monitoring mechanism (over 99% accuracy) that provide the means to perform reliable data sanity check on ankle circumference measurements in a continuous manner.