Design and Implementation of a Multifunction Wearable Device to Monitor Sleep Physiological Signals.

We present a wearable device built on an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express (CPE) board and integrated with a photoplethysmographic (PPG) optical sensor for heart rate monitoring and multiple embedded sensors for medical applications-in particular, sleep physiological signal monitoring. Our device is portable and lightweight. Due to the microcontroller unit (MCU)-based architecture of the proposed device, it is scalable and flexible. Thus, with the addition of different plug-and-play sensors, it can be used in many applications in different fields. The innovation introduced in this study is that with additional sensors, we can determine whether there are intermediary variables that can be modified to improve our sleep monitoring algorithm. Additionally, although the proposed device has a relatively low cost, it achieves substantially improved performance compared to the commercially available Philips ActiWatch2 wearable device, which has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To assess the reliability of our device, we compared physiological sleep signals recorded simultaneously from volunteers using both our device and ActiWatch2. Motion and light detection data from our device were shown to be correlated to data simultaneously collected using the ActiWatch2, with correlation coefficients of 0.78 and 0.89, respectively. For 7 days of continuous data collection, there was only one instance of a false positive, in which our device detected a sleep interval, while the ActiWatch2 did not. The most important aspect of our research is the use of an open architecture. At the hardware level, general purpose input/output (GPIO), serial peripheral interface (SPI), integrated circuit (I