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Unobtrusive continuous monitoring of important vital signs and activity metrics has the potential to provide remote health monitoring, at-home screening, and rapid notification of critical events such as heart attacks, falls, or respiratory distress. This paper contains validation results of a wireless Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) patch sensor consisting of two electrocardiography (ECG) electrodes, a microcontroller, a tri-axial accelerometer, and a BLE transceiver. The sensor measures heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), respiratory rate, posture, steps, and falls and was evaluated on a total of 25 adult participants who performed breathing exercises, activities of daily living (ADLs), various stretches, stationary cycling, walking/running, and simulated falls. Compared to reference devices, the heart rate measurement had a mean absolute error (MAE) of less than 2 bpm, time-domain HRV measurements had an RMS error of less than 15 ms, respiratory rate had an MAE of 1.1 breaths per minute during metronome breathing, posture detection had an accuracy of over 95% in two of the three patch locations, steps were counted with an absolute error of less than 5%, and falls were detected with a sensitivity of 95.2% and specificity of 100%.

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We consider spatial multiplexing systems in correlated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channels with equal power allocated to each transmit antenna. Under this constraint, the number and subset of transmit antennas together with the transmit symbol constellations are determined assuming knowledge of the channel correlation matrices. We first consider a fixed data rate system and vary the number of transmit antennas and constellation such that the minimum margin in the signalto-noise ratio (SNR) is maximized for linear and Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) receivers. We also derive transmit antenna and constellation selection criteria for a successive interference cancellation receiver (SCR) with a fixed detection order and a variable number of bits transmitted on each substream. Compared with a system using all available antennas, performance results show significant gains using a subset of transmit antennas, even for independent fading channels. Finally, we select a subset of transmit antennas to maximize data rate given a minimum SNR margin. A lower bound on the maximum outage data rate is derived. The maximum outage data rate of the SCR receiver is seen to be close to the outage channel capacity.

The throughput-delay performance of a half-duplex relay channel with hybrid-automatic retransmission request (HARQ) is analyzed in this paper. The protocol uses a form of incremental redundancy HARQ transmission with assistance from the relay via space-time coding if the relay decodes the message before the destination. The packet delay constraint is represented by L, the maximum number of HARQ rounds. An outage is declared if the packet is unsuccessful after L HARQ rounds. A delay-limited throughput is defined in this paper to explicitly account for finite delay constraints and associated non-zero packet outage probabilities. For small outage probabilities, this delay-limited throughput is greater than the conventional long-term average throughput. An exact expression is obtained for the outage probability to compare the throughputdelay performance of this half-duplex relay protocol with direct transmission. The delay-limited throughput of the relay channel is significantly larger than that of direct transmission for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), target outage probabilities, delay constraints and relay positions.

We analyze the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff in a fading relay channel at finite signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). In this framework, the rate adaptation policy is such that the target system data rate is a multiple of the capacity of an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The proportionality constant determines how aggressively the system scales the data rate and can be interpreted as a finite-SNR multiplexing gain. The diversity gain is given by the negative slope of the outage probability with respect to the SNR. Finite-SNR diversity performance is estimated using a constrained max-flow min-cut upper bound on the relay channel capacity. Moreover, the finite-SNR diversity-multiplexing tradeoff is characterized for three practical decode and forward half-duplex cooperative protocols with different amounts of broadcasting and simultaneous reception. For each configuration, system performance is computed as a function of SNR under a system-wide power constraint on the source and relay transmissions. Our analysis yields the following findings; (i) improved multiplexing performance can be achieved at any SNR by allowing the source to transmit constantly, (ii) both broadcasting and simultaneous reception are desirable in half-duplex relay cooperation for superior diversitymultiplexing performance, and (iii) the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff at finite-SNR is impacted by the power partitioning between the source and the relay terminals. Finally, we verify our analytical results by numerical simulations.Index Terms-Cooperative diversity, finite-SNR diversitymultiplexing tradeoff, max-flow min-cut theorem, half-duplex relay protocols

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Continuous monitoring of respiratory rate in ambulatory conditions has widespread applications for screening of respiratory diseases and remote patient monitoring. Unfortunately, minimally obtrusive techniques often suffer from low accuracy. In this paper, we describe an algorithm with low computational complexity for combining multiple respiratory measurements to estimate breathing rate from an unobtrusive chest patch sensor. Respiratory rates derived from the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and modulation of the QRS amplitude of electrocardiography (ECG) are combined with a respiratory rate derived from tri-axial accelerometer data. The three respiration rates are combined by a weighted average using weights based on quality metrics for each signal. The algorithm was evaluated on 15 elderly subjects who performed spontaneous and metronome breathing as well as a variety of activities of daily living (ADLs). When compared to a reference device, the mean absolute error was 1.02 breaths per minute (BrPM) during metronome breathing, 1.67 BrPM during spontaneous breathing, and 2.03 BrPM during ADLs.