Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento, 73100 Lecce, Italy.
Department of Information Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications (DIET), Sapienza University of Rome, 00184 Rome, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2020 May 16;20(10):2833. doi: 10.3390/s20102833.
One of the major goals of Health 4.0 is to offer personalized care to patients, also through real-time, remote monitoring of their biomedical parameters. In this regard, wearable monitoring systems are crucial to deliver continuous appropriate care. For some biomedical parameters, there are a number of well established systems that offer adequate solutions for real-time, continuous patient monitoring. On the other hand, monitoring skin hydration still remains a challenging task. The continuous monitoring of this physiological parameter is extremely important in several contexts, for example for athletes, sick people, workers in hostile environments or for the elderly. State-of-the-art systems, however, exhibit some limitations, especially related with the possibility of continuous, real-time monitoring. Starting from these considerations, in this work, the feasibility of an innovative time-domain reflectometry (TDR)-based wearable, skin hydration sensing system for real-time, continuous monitoring of skin hydration level was investigated. The applicability of the proposed system was demonstrated, first, through experimental tests on reference substances, then, directly on human skin. The obtained results demonstrate the TDR technique and the proposed system holds unexplored potential for the aforementioned purposes.
健康 4.0 的主要目标之一是为患者提供个性化护理，方法是实时远程监测他们的生物医学参数。在这方面，可穿戴监测系统对于提供持续的适当护理至关重要。对于一些生物医学参数，有许多成熟的系统为实时、连续的患者监测提供了充分的解决方案。另一方面，监测皮肤水合作用仍然是一项具有挑战性的任务。在许多情况下，持续监测这个生理参数都极其重要，例如运动员、病人、在恶劣环境中工作的人员或老年人。然而，最先进的系统存在一些局限性，特别是在连续实时监测的可能性方面。基于这些考虑因素，在这项工作中，研究了一种基于时域反射（TDR）的创新可穿戴式、皮肤水合作用传感系统，用于实时、连续监测皮肤水合水平的可行性。首先通过对参考物质的实验测试，然后直接在人体皮肤上，验证了所提出系统的适用性。所获得的结果表明，TDR 技术和所提出的系统在上述目的方面具有尚未开发的潜力。
