Evaluation in Healthy Subjects of a Transcutaneous Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Wristband during Hypo and Hypercapnia...

The development of wearable devices for healthcare monitoring is of primary interest, in particular for homecare applications. But it is challenging to develop an evaluation framework to test and optimize such a device by following a non-invasive protocol. As well established reference devices do exist for capnometry, we propose a protocol to evaluate and compare the performance of the transcutaneous carbon dioxide monitoring wristband that we develop. We present here this protocol, the signal processing pipeline and the data analysis based on signal alignment and intercorrelation study, and the first results on a cohort of 13 healthy subjects. This test allows demonstrating the influence of the device response time and of the carbon dioxide content in the ambient air.Clinical Relevance-The protocol described here allows to test and optimize the new device in clinical conditions simulating hypo and hypercapnia variations on a subject at rest, as it would be the case at home to monitor the health status of chronic respiratory patients, and to compare the performances with reference devices. A strong intercorrelation greater than 0.8 has been observed in 5 healthy subjects out of 13 and factors influencing the intercorrelation are suggested.