Low-Power Wearable ECG Monitoring System for Multiple-Patient Remote Monitoring

Many devices and solutions for remote electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring have been proposed in the literature. These solutions typically have a large marginal cost per added sensor and are not seamlessly integrated with other smart home solutions. Here, we propose an ECG remote monitoring system that is dedicated to non-technical users in need of long-term health monitoring in residential environments and is integrated in a broader Internet-of-Things (IoT) infrastructure. Our prototype consists of a complete vertical solution with a series of advantages with respect to the state of the art, considering both the prototypes with integrated front end and prototypes realized with off-the-shelf components: 1) ECG prototype sensors with record-low energy per effective number of quantized levels; 2) an architecture providing low marginal cost per added sensor/user; and 3) the possibility of seamless integration with other smart home systems through a single IoT infrastructure.

I. Introduction

Wearable biomedical devices can take advantage of two concurring technology trends. On the one hand, the exponential reduction in cost per function enabled by semiconductor technology, popularized as “Moore’s Law”, makes low-power and high-performance microcontrollers and radios available at low cost. On the other hand, broadband penetration is very high in large sectors of the population, especially in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. The very same trends are the enabling factors of the so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT), i.e. the deployment of applications based on distributed communicating sensors and actuators.