An Android based wireless ECG monitoring system for cardiac arrhythmia

Abstract

The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is emerging by leaps and bound due to tremendous evolutions in sensors and wireless communication technologies. For WBAN technology improvisation, researchers are mainly concentrating on technical parameters of health monitoring to make it interactive and real time based. A WBAN is an integration of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to connect various Biomedical Wireless Sensors (BWSs) located inside and outside of the human body to collect and transmit vital signals. The collected biomedical data is send to the hospitals and medical centres for therapeutic, diagnostic analysis and treatment. An electrocardiogram (ECG), a non-invasive mechanism, is widely used to establish medical diagnosis of heart diseases in health care systems. This paper presents a microcontroller ARM7 based health monitoring system intended to monitor and to early detect situations when heart rate and blood oxygen level are out of their safe ranges. The main objective of this proposal is to prevent emergency situations by informing the patient to take actions before patient's health condition get worse leading to emergency medical care. This system employs a programmable ARM7 for confab the bio-signal to determine the condition of heart. If any abnormalities are discovered from patient's heart parameters, the system sends alarm to the doctor. The system ensures wireless transmission of ECG signal to the Medical Server (doctor's PC) through Bluetooth and Android platform. This endows doctor to have visual description of patient's ECG on Medical Server and if critical condition exists, system will send alert messages to the doctor on his mobile phone even if doctor is away from Medical server. The experimental result shows that the device is compact, cheap, user friendly and useful.