Contemporary and Nascent Techniques for Monitoring of Oxygenation as a Vital Sign

Among the vital signs of human health, respiration is a critical component of a person’s well being. Physicians want to frequently and accurately measure respiration parameters such as partial pressure of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood, respiration rate, and peripheral blood oxygen saturation as changes in respiration parameters give some of the first signs of the onset of patient decline. Despite the recent developments in the field of medical wearable technology, remote monitoring of respiration parameters has yet to be sufficiently investigated. Conventional respiratory sensors, currently employed in the form of bulky, expensive, tethered bedside equipment, are not convenient for remote monitoring. In this paper, we discuss the medical requirements and the technical design challenges associated with creating a wearable, wireless respiratory monitoring system. We first investigate the working principle of available technologies and second explore the adaptation of techniques through different modalities of oxygenation such as partial pressure and hemoglobin saturation of oxygen via arterial blood gas, the partial pressure of transcutaneous oxygen, and peripheral oxygen saturation of blood hemoglobin.