An Automatic Wearable Electrocardiographic System

The proliferation and popularity of open source hardware and software has brought the health industry to rapid evolution, creating portable and low-cost medical devices for monitoring vital signals. Recent technological advances in wireless communications and wireless sensor networks have enabled the design of low-cost, intelligent, tiny, and lightweight medical sensor nodes that can be strategically placed on human body, create a wireless body area network (WBAN) to monitor various physiological vital signs for a long period of time and providing real-time feedback to the user and medical staff. Electrocardiographic (ECG) equipment plays a vital role for diagnosis of cardiac disease, but the cost of this equipment is huge and the operation is too much complex which cannot offer better services to a large population in developing countries. In this paper, I have designed and implemented a low cost fully portable and wearable ECG monitoring system based on Arduino platform; medical sensors were used to collect physiological data from patients and transmit it to Android smart phone using Bluetooth standard. I introduced priority scheduling and data compression into the system to increase transmission rate of physiological critical signals which improve the bandwidth utilization. The purpose it was to create a mobile and wearable device for remote teleassistance. The results obtained by the device were tested comparing them with those obtained from a traditional ECG used in clinical practice on 85 people