Sensing Technologies for Oxygen Therapy Monitoring: A Survey

Supplemental oxygen is recognized worldwide as a life-saving treatment for first aid, acute and chronic diseases, and this has recently become more important than ever, due to the recent Covid-19 pandemic. This study aims to analyze two important issues related to oxygen therapy in patients with respiratory difficulties, namely oxygen quality and patient safety monitoring. The specific case in which the supply of oxygen fails due to the disconnection of the nasal cannula has no solution in the open literature. As a result, tangible results on how such risk can be avoided are still missing, and hardly any guideline can be found on how to treat this issue from the engineering perspective. In this respect, this work is dedicated to exploring sensing technologies used to detect vital signs and track the patient's condition in real time during therapy, with the aim of defining a starting picture of the current state of the art. The results obtained following the verification of some of the most used sensors in the market are therefore presented and discussed. The integration of these components in an embedded system has also allowed us to understand the practical limits and strengths in terms of complexity and effectiveness of each technology.