In-Flight Vital Signs Monitoring MATERIAL & METHODS
All team members agreed that prior to the flight test, American Airliner's technical staff and the Federal Aviation Administration had to assess the electromagnetic emission profile of the telemetry devices to ensure on board safety. The flight was chosen by the airline authorities. Only aircraft equipped with cellular phones were eligible for the experiment. All measurements were taken by the authors. During each transmission, the following parameters were taken into consideration and transmitted, mimicking a real scenario.

1. EKG (3 leads)
2. Blood Pressure
3. Pulse
4. Respiration rate
5. Surface body temperature
6. oxygen saturation from pulse oxymeter
7. End tidal CO2
8. Real time video
The hardware chosen for this project consisted of a portable monitoring device (ProPaq/Protocol Systems), powered with a 15 volt, 0.7 Amp battery. The Propaq 106 is the perfect monitor for this application due to its light weight (<13 lbs.fully configured), it also has a communication port and it is the only monitor approved by the USAF for large body carriers. Because there was no existing solution to obtain data from the serial port and send it as "packets" to the Internet, Dr. Kevin Montgomery, from NASA-Ames, (also known as the "byte-master") wrote the software that allowed the computer read the data streaming from the Propaq generating a graphical representation of the patient's vital signs.

The rest of the hardware consisted of a 200 MHz Pentium chip based, with MMX technology, laptop computer, (TheBrick Computer Company), running on a Windows'95 architecture, powered with a 12 volt battery, and displayed in the LCD window. The data from the ProPaq is sent via the communication port to be then compressed by the software into small packages of data. This packages gain access to the Internet via the cellular phone placed on the back seat of the aircraft. Although the computer modem speed can go as high as 33,600 bps the actual connection achieved was 4,800 bps, which is the standard for cellular technology.

This picture shows the type of phone aboard commercial aircraft. This model, the AT&T - AIRONE phone was used during the broadcast of vital signs during both, the ground and the flight test. The device has a RJ-11 data port that allows a modem connection only at 4,800 bps. The configuration was not as easy as expected, but the Wireless AT&T team was very helpfull and available all the time.

With no doubt the ideal communication link should be done through satellites, however rates can be as high as $10,000/hour, making this option not very cost effective.

Set-up used during the "ground" and "flight" broadcast