Unobtrusive Monitoring of Cardiovascular Health at Home Using a Modified Weighing Scale

Abstract

This paper presents a review of our team’s research efforts over the past eight years focusing on providing innovative solutions for actionable and unobtrusive home health monitoring using a common household device: the weighing scale. By interfacing the mechanical and electrical sensors available in modern digital weighing scales to dedicated analog front end circuits, developing a customized toolkit of algorithms for processing and analyzing measured signals, and conducting targeted human subjects studies to elucidate relationships between underlying physiological changes and features of the signals, we have opened up a combination of new potential solutions to important health monitoring needs; additionally, we have uncovered new scientific questions to address in further studies. In particular, we have focused on better understanding longitudinal measurements of the ballistocardiogram (BCG) signal – representing the cardiogenic reactionary forces of the body – and how the BCG can complement other more well-known measures of cardiovascular performance. The key technological challenges and barriers we have attempted to address in this work, as well as the scientific questions that are currently at the forefront of our research, are outlined and discussed here.