A basic platform for the study of a wireless health telemonitoring system

Opas Chutatape; Palai Silapaporn

Authors

Opas Chutatape Department of Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering, Rangsit University, Patumthani, 12000, Thailand
Palai Silapaporn College of Engineering, Rangsit University, Patumthani, 12000, Thailand

Keywords:

ECG signal, telemonitoring, soundcard, internet, GPRS, QoS

Abstract

A simple hardware configuration of a health telemonitoring system consisting of an instrumentation amplifier including a signal conditioning circuit, a laptop computer, and a GPRS/EDGE air-card is set up at one location to communicate with a computer at another location in the Wi-Fi network. The first computer measures the single-lead ECG data using the built-in soundcard as an analog-to-digital converter, followed by downsampling, filtering, and displaying before sending out to the communication network. The data is then received by the remotely located second computer to display and record in real-time. The whole system is set up to investigate various issues that underline the operating functions of the remote real-time monitoring and displaying of this type of data. The implementation of the front-end subsystem is elaborated here and the performance of a flexible Java-coded digital signal processing is demonstrated. In the data transmission section, without the option to negotiate the QoS as required, low channel bandwidth is always the main cause of data congestion. However, the system output may still be regulated by dynamically adjusting the window size of the received data and by a suitably chosen overall delay time, as explained vividly by a diagram. It is expected that this set-up system can be effectively used as an economical prototype for future study of remote monitoring and real-time continuous data transmission through the heterogeneous network.

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