Human activity monitoring with a wrist worn instrument, the actigraph, has successfully been used to quantify bulk human activity, and predict macro-quantities such as hr:min of sleep. These devices do not yield information about the underlying movement physiology because the simple detection methods ignore important signal characteristics. Recently it was demonstrated heart and lung ballistic activity are measurable from the wrist with a wireless device the size of a wristwatch. These conclusions derived from extensive bench top data processing and sophisticated tools like the wavelet transform. This SBIR seeks to build the next generation actigraph, one that can predict heart rate and breath rate from a sleeping or ambulatory individual "in situ", and expand this technique to other physiological processes. The device will use a custom built analog integrated circuit (from a related SBIR), coprocessor, adaptive digital filtering and 'non-stationary spectrum' processing techniques. Phase I will concentrate on building the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) actigraph, and testing it worn on sleeping subjects. One goal of the DSP actigraph is produce a stream of estimates for heart and breath rate over the duration of a sleep period. Phase II will extend the technique to ambulatory subjects, and improve hardware producibility. The ambulatory wrist worn DSP actigraph will able to measure ballistic cardiac and breath rates "in situ" in near real time, which is expected to have military and civilian clinical applications. Such a device will simplify long term monitoring on adults, children and neonates. When fully developed, it will combine physiological data with conventional sleep scoring and performance modeling. Techniques developed have wide application to other ambulatory instruments and sensor types.
