A PDA BASED AMBULATORY HUMAN SKIN RESISTANCE MEASURING SYSTEM

摘要

Ambulatory monitoring system is used in hospital and clinical practice to detect, document, and characterize occurrences of abnormal heath condition of a patient or a normal person during ordinary daily activities. Presented here is a PDA based ambulatory system developed in RMIT University to continuously record human skin resistance. Skin resistance is an important human physiological parameter used in both western medicine and complementary medicine. Although ambulatory monitoring devices for various biopotentials and vital sign signals have attracted many research efforts recently, little research and development has been done for skin impedance. This proposed skin resistance measurement system, as a pilot for the impedance monitoring system, is composed of a PDA, a third party data acquisition card that uses the compact flash slot of the PDA, an analogue front end and a glove measuring electrode system. This design fully utilises the computing power of a PDA and minimises the data acquisition and the analogue system. It is a low power consumption system that supports up to 10 hours continuous recording. The initial test results indicate it is a reliable human skin resistance measurement device and is suitable to be integrated into other telemedical systems.