Batteryless NFC Device for Heart Rate and SpO2 Acquisition

The emergency demands for wearable biomedical devices have grown significantly due to the pandemic context caused by COVID-19. On the other hand, wearable and low power devices have been spread out into biomedical applications due to their practical applicability. In this context, this work presents a batteryless wearable prototype enabled with the Near Field Communication technology, that can measure the user heart rate and blood oxygen saturation in a non-invasive and real-time way. Moreover, a smartphone app was developed, that can provide, simultaneously, wireless power and data transfer between smartphone and the batteryless device. A pilot study was conducted with 10 volunteers for statistical evaluating purposes of accuracy and usability of the prototype. The measurements of heart rate achieved accuracy of − 1.1 ± 1.4 BPM and SpO2 accuracy of 1.0 ± 0.8%, which satisfy international standards for clinical applications. Among the evaluations made by the volunteers, the proposed device achieved 90% of satisfaction.