Portable Multi-parameter Patient Simulator

Abstract

Finding volunteer patients and/or getting ethical approval for experimental studies on human participants are generally serious problems in the field of biomedical engineering. Therefore, this study presents a new, low cost, portable microcontroller-based multi-parameter patient simulator that makes the calibration more convenient without oscilloscope, programmable amplifier, programmable filter and stabilized voltage supply. The developed simulator generates graphical representations of three normal physiological signals these are electrocardiograph (ECG), phonocardiograph (PCG), carotid pulse (CP). Discrete wavelet transform has been used to pre-process the mentioned signals, in order to denoise and decompose these ECG, PCG and CP signals to the third approximated level. The developed multi-parameter simulator was implemented using the Arduino Due and Uno microcontrollers. The simulated ECG, PCG and CP signals are nearly equal to the real heart signals. Therefore, they are accepted to represent different scenarios of the heart sounds clinically. Graphical microcontroller-based graphical representation of ECG, PCG, CP signals and acoustical PCG wave simulator has been successfully developed to support biomedical engineering education and research studies in the field of physiological signals analysis.