A Portable System for Non-Invasive Cardiovascular Monitoring in Older Adults: Design and Validation

: The healthcare system is experiencing profound change, driven by two key factors: the progressive aging of the population and the growing pressure from the increased demand for care. In this context, portable devices play a crucial role in enabling remote monitoring, especially for older population. Many portable devices have already been proposed in the literature and introduced to the market. Unfortunately, they all have shortcomings: they either require multiple devices and complex configurations, or they lack clear visual or auditory feedback. This paper therefore presents an innovative technological solution for monitoring cardiovascular health, designed to be non-invasive and user-friendly. In particular, the device integrates high-sensitivity sensors that allow simultaneous acquisition of photoplethysmographic (PPG) and electrocardiographic (ECG) signals through direct finger contact for 30 seconds, allowing the extraction of fundamental electrocardiographic parameters (PR, QRS, QT, RR, HR), oxygen saturation (SpO₂) and second derivative photoplethysmography indices SDPTG (b/a, c/a, d/a, e/a, SDPTG-AI). The system was validated on a court of 33 participants: 19 women and 14 men (age: 64 ± 10.48 years), by comparing its performance to a standard medical-grade instrumentation. The system showed good agreement with reference measurements for the QRS duration, RR interval and heart rate, but the PR interval showed more variability, probably due to the difficulties in detecting the P wave. The results concerning SpO₂ were also consistent with those obtained using the standard reference instrumentation. Moreover, the analysis of SDPTG indices suggest that the device could also serve as a screening tool for vascular health. Future work will aim to enhancing real-time connectivity, improve P-wave detection accuracy and validate the device on a larger population. .