Wearable And Wireless Activities Aware Body-Centric Ecg Network (Wiser-Ecg)
Authors: Abbasi Qammer 
Published: November 2013

The interest in smart bodyâ€centric wireless networks (BCWNs) for healthcare applications is increasing as clinical acceptance of wireless technology is growing; they potentially combine ease of use with greater independence to the patient. BCWNs are emerging for inâ€patient and outâ€patient monitoring of ECGs, pulse oximeter, blood pressure, insulin pumps and blood glucose. Coupled with the use of locationâ€based systems, BCWNs can be applied to ensure the wellâ€being and safety of aged people in different scenarios with continuous monitoring and tracking. Particularly, Wearable electrocardiogram (W-ECG) recorders are increasingly in use for long-term care for patients with chronic disease, assistive technology for the elderly, risk management for people in rehabilitation, lifestyle monitoring, pre-and post-chirurgical monitoring, and heart anomalies early detection [1]. Devices currently available in the market can typically provide an activity-aware, 2 channels, 3-channels ECG or a 5-channels ECG [2]. However, the systems mentioned are limited in the quality of ECG singles received due to the restrictions on the number of electrodes used. A 12-channels ECG would give a more detailed look at the heart&#39;s three areas (anterior, lateral, inferior), and changes in certain segments of the ECG in the related leads for each area suggest the area of concern. Thus, this work addresses the demand of a wireless activity-aware 12-channels ECG to replace inconvenient wires. Available off-the-shelf programmable sensors is initially applied to test the functionality of the algorithms and also to identify the required components aiding in reducing size and cost. A key point of the successful deployment is a long-term test trial performed within a partnered cardiologist institution, to verify ECGs data against obtained with data from standardized devices. Eliminating wires attached to the patient that usually strap the patient and limit his/her movement and activities would make a patient more comfortable while wearing the ECG system and therefore allow continuous monitoring over a longer period of time. Moreover, the compensation of ECG noise due to the body movement enables the patient to wear the W-ECG while during normal life activities. In this way, a long-term evaluation monitoring the heart activities after a surgery, enabling an early detection of several heart-related diseases or predict heart activity failures can be performed without the patient repeatedly having to visit the doctor or being in bed, with a dramatic improvement of quality of life. Fig. 1 shows measured average power consumption against margins for multi-hop (MH) and single-hop (SH) networks in W-ECG monitoring applications tested on real subject. References: [1] J. Sriram, M. Shin, T. Choudhury, D. Kotz, &quot;Activity-aware ECG-based patient authentication for remote health monitoring&quot;, ICMI-MLMI &#39;09 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Multimodal interfaces, Pages 297-304. [2] Shuo Xiao; Dhamdhere, A.; Sivaraman, V.; Burdett, A.; , &quot;Transmission Power Control in Body Area Sensor Networks for Healthcare Monitoring,&quot; Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal on , vol.27, no.1, pp.37-48, January 2009