A WI-FI BASED SMART DATA LOGGER FOR CAPSULE ENDOSCOPY AND MEDICAL APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a non-invasive technology for capturing images of a human digestive system for medical diagnostics purpose. With WCE, the patient swallows a miniature capsule with camera, data processing unit, RF transmitter and batteries. The capsule captures and transmits images wirelessly from inside the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The external data logger worn by the patient stores the images and is later on transferred to a computer for presentation and image analysis. In this research, we designed and built a Wi-Fi based, low cost, miniature, versatile wearable data logger. The data logger is used with Wi-Fi enabled smart devices, smart phones and data servers to store and present images captured by capsule. The proposed data logger is designed to work with wireless capsule endoscopy and other biosensors like- temperature and heart rate sensors. The data logger is small enough to carry and conduct daily activities, and the patient do not need to carry traditional bulky data recorder all the time during diagnosis. The doctors can remotely access data and analyze the images from capsule endoscopy using remote access feature of the data logger. Smartphones and tablets have extensive processing power with expandable memory. This research exploits those capabilities to use with wireless capsule endoscopy and medical data logging applications. The application- specific data recorders are replaced by the proposed Wi-Fi data logger and smartphone. The data processing application is distributed on smart devices like smartphone /tablets and data logger. Once data are stored in smart devices, the data can be accessed remotely, distributed to the cloud and shared within networks to enable telemedicine. The data logger can work in both standalone and network mode. In the normal mode of the device, data logger stores medical data locally into a micro Secure Digital card for future download using the universal serial bus to the computer. In network mode, the real-time data is streamed into a smartphone and tablet for further processing and storage. The proposed Wi-Fi based data logger is prototyped in the lab and tested with the capsule hardware developed in our laboratory. The supporting Android app is also developed to collect data from the data logger and present the processed data to the viewer. The PC based software is also developed to access the data recorder and capture and download data from the data logger in real-time remotely. Both in vivo and ex vivo trials using live pig have been conducted to validate the performance of the proposed device.