Adapting BLE protocol for medical standard ECG transmission
Sudheer Babu, Sai Prem Shaji, Abhinay Vishwanatham, K. V. Sai Sundar, T Amar Sainath Reddy, Siva Sankara Sai Sanagapati, Satyabrataa Mohanty · 2017
Smart solutions for cardiac monitoring are need of the hour in tackling the devastating effects of heart diseases that are plaguing the world today. Cardiac monitoring and screening technologies like Electrocardiography (ECG) need to be moved out from within the confines of hospital walls to places within easy reach of the wider mass of the countrys population; through remote deployment in primary care centers and homes. Affordability, accuracy and deep penetration are key to the success of any envisaged solution. The accuracy of reports generated by a remotely deployed ECG monitor primarily depend on the accuracy of the actual hardware making the measurement, and can be guaranteed by choosing any of the time tested bio-potential measurement ICs. The penetration however depends on the technology deployed for remote access of the ECG device. This technology must have the potential to be easily integrated into the minimal networking infrastructure existing in the rural areas and hinterlands of the country. A combination of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and cellular networks, utilizing a smartphone, supporting minimum features, as a common access point is a promising solution for remotely accessing an ECG monitor deployed in rural areas. The challenge however is in developing methods to reliably transmit ECG data over both the BLE link and cellular networks meeting all the QoS requirements of medical standard ECG monitoring application. In this paper we first list out a set of QoS requirements for ECG monitoring application, drawn from discussions with cardiologists and from studying existing literature. We then explore the feasibility of a BLE link meeting these requirements, with supporting results from tests performed with a prototype which we developed.