Wireless ECG Patient Monitoring System Performance Aimed at Off-/On-body Communications

World Health Organization (WHO) reported that heart disease, stroke, lower respiratory infections and chronic obstructive lung disease have remained the top major killers in the world during the past decade. In Indonesia, it covers 37% or about 1.8 millions mortality cases. Hence, human vital sign monitoring such as electrocardiograph (ECG) monitoring system is very essential for mitigating and preventing people hearth's fail to be handled a proper assistance from healthcare physicians. For that purpose, we propose a real time ECG monitoring system, which the ECG data is monitored wirelessly directly without any server for data pooling (centralized database). ECG QRS wave and arrhythmia detection are important features for ECG monitoring system. Up to now, there are several studies ECG wave detection, however, they are mainly focus on internet of things - based telemedicine system for data transfer. In this case, real time monitoring system could be disrupted by a pooling time and packet loss due to its IP-based connection. Hence, we propose a wireless ECG patient monitoring system based on point to point communication scheme at 2.4 GHz band by using 3-lead acquisition system on single channel wireless ECG device. The system is developed based on AD8232 chip for acquisition, NRF24101 wireless link platform for data transfer and Arduino™microcontroller for ECG data processing. In order to evaluate the performance of wireless ECG system, our developed wearable textile antennas (as Tx and Rx antenna) are attached on the human body and experimentally evaluated within indoor environment, simulating off-/on-body communication system. The wearable textile antenna is lightweight, small and insensitive to the resonant frequency due to the human body effect. The measurement is conducted by embedding the antennas at some body positions of the volunteers. The experimental results show that the proposed ECG monitoring system is able to transfer and display real time ECG signals well for off-/on-body communication schemes. In addition, to validate the results, the obtained ECG data are compared and analyzed with the healthcare clinic equipment. According to QRS wave analysis, the ECG signals have reasonable RR, PR, QRS and ST wave interval in comparison with the standard ECG signals. We convince that our developed ECG patient monitoring system is stable by applying our developed textile antennas and it is promising to be adopted in the hospital for future implementation.