Supervision of human vital signs has always been an essential part in healthcare. Nowadays there is a strong interest in contact-less monitoring methods as they operate less static and offer higher flexibility to the people observed. Recent industrial development enabled radar functionality to be packed in single-chip solutions, decreasing application complexity and speeding up designs. Within this thesis, a vital sign radar prototype has been developed utilising a recently released 60GHz frequency modulated continous wave single-chip radar. The electronics development has been focused on compactness and high system integration. Special attention has been given to the onboard analogue signal filtering and digital data preprocessing. The resulting prototype radar is then tested and evaluated using test scenarios with increasing difficulty. The final experiments prove that the radar is capable of tracking human respiration rate and heartbeat simultaneously from a distance of 1m. It can be concluded that modern radar devices may be significantly miniaturised for e.g. portable operation while offering a wide variety of application possibilities including vital sign monitoring.

Doctorado en Salud Pública / Esta tesis aborda la incertidumbre presente en las mediciones usadas en el análisis y las decisiones en salud pública. La medida de entropía es adaptada para expresar la incertidumbre contenida en el conteo de las causas de muertes en las estadísticas vitales oficiales de Chile. A partir de los hallazgos, discute los requerimientos metrológicos en salud pública, tan importantes como las mediciones mismas. Además considera y argumenta la existencia de incertidumbre asociada con las propiedades performativas de las estadísticas. Tanto por la forma de estructurar los datos a la manera de una cierta sintaxis de lo real, como por las exclusiones de aquello que queda mas allá de la modelación cuantitativa usada en cada caso. Mediante una aproximación a la herencia del pensamiento pragmático y usando herramientas conceptuales de la sociología de la traducción y la Actor Network Theory (ANT), destaca que la incertidumbre puede contribuir en salud pública a un debate acerca de la vinculación entre técnica, democracia y la formación de un público.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1967. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Ciências da Saúde, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Bioética, 2018. / Submitted by Raquel Viana (raquelviana@bce.unb.br) on 2018-07-03T20:01:44Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2018_TicianaGarciaFernandesVieira.pdf: 1027033 bytes, checksum: 0918597337bab09b5b2fcb9e30dbdc83 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Raquel Viana (raquelviana@bce.unb.br) on 2018-07-09T18:57:30Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2018_TicianaGarciaFernandesVieira.pdf: 1027033 bytes, checksum: 0918597337bab09b5b2fcb9e30dbdc83 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-09T18:57:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2018_TicianaGarciaFernandesVieira.pdf: 1027033 bytes, checksum: 0918597337bab09b5b2fcb9e30dbdc83 (MD5) / As diretivas antecipadas de vontade (DAV), comumente chamadas de testamento vital (TV), são um documento que dispõe sobre os últimos desejos  aqueles atinentes aos cuidados de saúde , onde o paciente em condição de terminalidade deixará registrado, quando não for mais capaz de exprimir a sua vontade, sobre os tratamentos que aceita ou não receber. O presente trabalho de revisão de literatura teve como objetivo principal analisar, a partir da perspectiva bioética, o pensamento de médicos e profissionais de saúde brasileiros sobre o referido instituto, tomando como premissas teóricas os princípios da autonomia e da dignidade da pessoa humana. Para tanto, estipulou-se como critérios de inclusão artigos publicados em revistas com revisão de pares, sobre pesquisas empíricas (qualitativas e quantitativas) realizadas com participantes/amostras brasileiras, com acesso a texto completo e em língua portuguesa, sem qualquer delimitação de data de publicação, disponíveis nas bases de dados Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde (BVS) e Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO). Os descritores incluíram os dois termos em buscas independentes (DAV e TV), associados aos termos médico, enfermeiro e profissional de saúde, inseridos em separado. Definiu-se ainda que a seleção dar-se-ia observando se, nos objetivos dos artigos pré-selecionados, haveria a existência de verbos ou expressões que indicassem por parte dos autores a intenção de saber o que pensam médicos, enfermeiros e demais profissionais de saúde brasileiros sobre as DAV/TV. Quanto aos critérios de exclusão, estabeleceu-se: (1) artigos teóricos, de revisão de literatura, editoriais, resumos de anais, capítulos e livros, dissertações e teses; (2) artigos de autores estrangeiros; e (3) artigos publicados em outras línguas. Na pesquisa on-line foram identificados 66 artigos dos quais 55 foram excluídos, 35 por não apresentarem consonância com os critérios de inclusão estabelecidos e 20 por estarem repetidos nas bases utilizadas. Portanto, 11 publicações foram selecionadas. Foram analisadas questões atinentes à terminalidade da vida, a dificuldade de médicos e enfermeiros de tratarem sobre o tema morte, a falta de conhecimento dos profissionais de saúde sobre as DAV e o TV e a necessidade de uma lei regulamentando as diretivas antecipadas, bem como a importância de abordar esse tema junto aos estudantes da área da saúde. Apesar do obscurantismo que cerca o instituto, observa-se que o mesmo é um instrumento hábil para fazer valer a autonomia do paciente, assegurando uma morte digna aos que padecem e também facilitando o diálogo na relação médico-profissional de saúde-paciente, evitando paternalismos. Conclui-se que as diretivas antecipadas de vontade atendem aos anseios de autonomia e dignidade desejados pelos pacientes em condição de terminalidade, fomentam um diálogo sincero e honesto na relação com médicos e profissionais de saúde, afastam a prática da distanásia e promovem a ortotanásia. O presente estudo teve o mérito de ampliar a compreensão sobre as diretivas antecipadas de vontade, diante da escassez de bibliografia no contexto brasileiro. / Advanced Care Documents, commonly called living wills, are a report that sets forth the last wishes  those concerning health care , where the terminally ill patient will leave a record, when it is no longer capable of expressing his will, about the treatments he accepts or doesn’t. The main objective of the present literature review was to analyze, from a bioethical perspective, the thinking of brazilian physicians and health professionals about this institute, taking as theoretical premises the principles of autonomy and dignity of the human person. For this purpose, articles published in peer-reviewed journals, on empirical researches (qualitative and quantitative) carried out with brazilian participants / samples, with access to full text and in portuguese language, without any date delimitation, available in the Virtual Health Library and in the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) databases, were stipulated as inclusion criteria. The descriptors included the two terms in independent searches, associated with the terms physician, nurse and health professional, inserted separately. It was also defined that the selection would occur if the objectives of the pre-selected articles would be the existence of verbs or expressions that indicate the intention of the authors to know what doctors, nurses and other brazilians health professionals think about the Advanced Care Documents. As for the exclusion criteria, it has been established: (1) theoretical articles, literature reviews, editorials, summaries of annals, chapters and books, dissertations and theses; (2) articles by foreign authors; and (3) articles published in other languages. In the online survey, 66 articles were identified, of which 55 were excluded, 35 because they were not in accordance with the established inclusion criteria and 20 because they were repeated in the databases used. Therefore, 11 publications were selected. Issues related to the termination of life, the difficulty of doctors and nurses to deal with the matter of death, the lack of knowledge of health professionals about Advanced Care Documents, and the need for an early directives law regulating, as well as the importance of addressing this subject with health students, have been analyzed. Despite the obscurantism that surrounds the argument, it has been observed that it is a skillful instrument to assert the autonomy of the patient, ensuring a dignified death to those who suffer and also facilitating the dialogue in the medical-professional relationship of health-patient, avoiding paternalisms. It has been concluded that the Advanced Care Documents meet the aspirations of autonomy and dignity desired by the terminally ill patients, foster a sincere and honest dialogue in the relationship with doctors and health professionals, put away the practice of dysthanasia and promote orthothanasia. The present study had the merit of expand the understanding about the Advanced Care Documents, given the bibliography scarcity in the brazilian context.

No description available.

This thesis explores the contactless estimation of people’s vital signs. We designed two camera-based systems and applied object detection algorithms to locate the regions of interest where vital signs are estimated. With the development of Deep Learning, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model has many applications in the real world nowadays. We applied the CNN based frameworks to the different types of camera based systems and improve the efficiency of the contactless vital signs estimation. In the field of medical healthcare, contactless monitoring draws a lot attention in the recent years because the wide use of different sensors. However most of the methods are still in the experimental phase and have never been used in real applications. We were interested in monitoring vital signs of patients lying in bed or sitting around the bed at a hospital. This required using sensors that have range of 2 to 5 meters. We developed a system based on the depth camera for detecting people’s chest area and the radar for estimating the respiration signal. We applied a CNN based object detection method to locate the position of the subject lying in the bed covered with blanket. And the respiratory-like signal is estimated from the radar device based on the detected subject’s location. We also create a manually annotated dataset containing 1,320 depth images. In each of the depth image the silhouette of the subject’s upper body is annotated, as well as the class. In addition, a small subset of the depth images also labeled four keypoints for the positioning of people’s chest area. This dataset is built on the data collected from the anonymous patients at the hospital which is substantial. Another problem in the field of human vital signs monitoring is that systems seldom contain the functions of monitoring multiple vital signs at the same time. Though there are few attempting to work on this problem recently, they are still all prototypes and have a lot limitations like shorter operation distance. In this application, we focused on contactless estimating subjects’ temperature, breathing rate and heart rate at different distances with or without wearing the mask. We developed a system based on thermal and RGB camera and also explore the feasibility of CNN based object detection algorithms to detect the vital signs from human faces with specifically defined RoIs based on our thermal camera system. We proposed the methods to estimate respiratory rate and heart rate from the thermal videos and RGB videos. The mean absolute difference (MAE) between the estimated HR using the proposed method and the baseline HR for all subjects at different distances is 4.24 ± 2.47 beats per minute, the MAE between the estimated RR and the reference RR for all subjects at different distances is 1.55 ± 0.78 breaths per minute.

No description available.

Distinguishing patients with acute coronary syndromes (ACS) within the very large proportion with suspected cardiac pain is a diagnostic challenge, especially in individuals without clear symptoms or electrocardiographic features. This thesis presents the development of a patient data fusion system that would ultimately be able to assist with early identification of patients with non-ST-elevation Acute Coronary Syndrome (NSTEACS) in the pre-hospital setting. In order to identify high-risk ACS patients, patients with ST changes need to be identified. A rule-based ST segment analysis technique was developed and validated on two publicly available databases. Even in subjects who are known to have myocardial ischaemia (MI), ST changes are not considered as a basis for a definitive diagnosis of individual episodes of ischaemia. A technique to differentiate between ST changes caused by MI and those caused by non-ischaemic ST changes such as body position changes or conduction changes was also developed. At the outset of this research there was no available database with continuous vital-sign data for recorded during the ambulance transport. A clinical study was set up to collect vitalsign data and ECG during ambulance transport. Additional parameters from the ECG such as heart rate variability that can be used for detecting ACS, particularly NSTEACS, were investigated. High-risk patients may be identified early by appropriate combination of vital-sign data, demographic information and ECG analysis. This thesis contributes to the literature on early identification of NSTEACS patient during the ambulance transportation. Firstly, it differentiate between ischaemic and non-ischaemic ST episodes using non-linear classifiers. pre-hospital data to ensure . Secondly, it investigates the diagnostic and prognostic value of heart rate variability in identifying high-risk NSTEACS patients in a pre-hospital setting. Thirdly, the thesis attempts to show how data fusion of vitalsign data and additional parameters from the ECG can be used to differentiate between noncardiac and NSTEACS patients in a pre-hospital setting. Lastly, the thesis also provides some insight into the data collection process in a pre-hospital setting.