A Wireless Electrocardiogram Detection for Personal Health

Monitoring
Liang-Hung Wang1, Tsung-Yen Chen1, Shuenn-Yuh Lee1, Tai-Hsuan Yang2,
Shi-Yan Huang2, Jen-Hao Wu2, and Kuang-Hao Lin2
1

Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan

Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chin Yi University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan
E-mail: ieesyl@ccu.edu.tw

AbstractThe current paper presents low-power analog

integrated circuits (ICs) for wireless electrocardiogram (ECG)
detection in personal health monitoring. Considering the
power-efficient communication in the body sensor network
(BSN), the required low-power analog ICs are developed for a
healthcare system through miniaturization and system
integration. The proposed system comprises the design and
implementation with three subsystems, namely, (1) the ECG
acquisition node, (2) the protocol for standard IEEE 802.15.4
ZigBee system, and (3) the radio frequency (RF) transmitter
circuits. A preamplifier, a low-pass filter, and a
successive-approximation analog-to-digital converter (SA-ADC)
are integrated to detect an ECG signal. For high integration, the
ZigBee protocol is adopted for wireless communication. To
transmit the ECG signal through wireless communication, a
quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator and a 2.4 GHz low-IF
transmitter with a power amplifier and up-conversion mixer are
also developed. In the receiver, a 2.4 GHz fully integrated CMOS
radio-frequency front-end with a low-noise amplifier, and a
quadrature mixer is proposed. The low-power wireless bio-signal
acquisition SoC (WBSA-SoC) has been implemented in TSMC
0.18-m standard CMOS process. The measurement results on
the human body reveal that the ECG signals can be acquired
effectively by the proposed SoC.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Rapid economic and industrial development leads to

increased intensity in daily life, which brings people negative
sentiments, such as nervousness, anxiety, and disturbance [1].
These emotions along with changes of quickly lifestyle result
that chronic cardiovascular (CV) diseases become the major
adult illnesses instead of infectious diseases, therefore, the
evolution of degenerative diseases resulted in the medical cost
increased rapidly. In recent years, the telemedicine information
system [2] becomes more and more essential, especially the
intelligent system is employed to not only supply a better
healthcare monitoring but to save the medicine cost [3].
Mainstream investigation has leaned toward the
development of biomedical devices. Furthermore, almost all
observation positions of human health (e.g., ECG, EEG, Blood,
and Pressure) can be monitored by the related bio-microsystem
device as shown in Fig. 1. A wide range of biomedical devices
and systems being integrated on a chip have been developed
rapidly. Moreover, telemedicine information system with
interactive and intelligent features has become increasingly
important to provide the high quality healthcare monitoring [4].
According to the BSN, home telecare monitoring allows
patients to examine themselves using bio-signal acquisition
nodes (BANs) [5][6]. The reader can collect the bio-signal on a

978-1-4673-5936-8/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

43

bio-information node (BIN) and submit personal data to the

healthcare center through the local sensor network.

Fig. 1. Different aspects of the human body for monitoring

Body sensor network (BSN) technology can transfer the

task of healthcare monitoring from the clinic to the healthcare
center for long-term attention; that is, allowing bio-signal
monitoring to be done daily than limiting it within the clinical
environment. The intelligent healthcare systems [6] can also be
applied to monitor the cardiovascular disease through wireless
communication; in addition, it provides not only reliable
medical information to patients for long-term monitoring, but
also alarms in the occurrence of critical conditions via the BSN
platform. For long-term and portable monitoring, the features
of low power and miniaturization are necessary, therefore, a
system-on-a-chip (SOC) with a very large-scale integration
(VLSI) technology should be employed in the circuit
implementation.
The IEEE 802.15.4 specification for low-rate wireless
personal area networks has been a hailed choice for industrial,
commercial, and home automation sensor network because of
its high density of nodes and simple protocol [7]. The ZigBee
standard has been adopted for low-power consumption and
low-cost effectiveness with standard-based wireless solution;
the standard is operated at three industrial, science, and medical
(ISM) bands, namely, the 868 MHz and 915MHz bands for
Europe and the U.S., respectively, and the 2.4 GHz band for
worldwide interchangeable. In the current paper, the proposed
wireless bio-signal acquisition SoC (WBSA-SoC) RF
transmitter is operated in an unlicensed 2.4 GHz band that the
scheme of digitized modulation is the offset-quadrature
phase-shift keying (OQPSK) with a 250 kbps data rate
supported by a 2.4 GHz with 2 MHz chip rate, generating a
transmittance spectrum with a 2 MHz bandwidth.

Fig. 2. Intelligent healthcare system

Fig. 3. Block diagram of the proposed wireless bio-signal acquisition SoC

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II

presents the system architecture in personal health monitoring.
Section III describes the circuit implementation of the wireless
ECG acquisition system. Section IV illustrates the
measurement results of the system integration. Section V
concludes the study.
II.

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE IN PERSONAL HEALTH

MONITORING

The aging of the population gives rise to chronic diseases

in daily life. The considerations of cost awareness in current
society, health monitoring has become more significant in
modern medicine. Prevention is better than cure is an
important concept in health care. In recent years, the home
telecare system (HTS) has been employed in personalized
examination by miniaturization and portable auxiliary. The
bio-signals are self-examined and transmission between the
person and medical center over the internet or through wireless
communication systems [8] is expected to play a more
prominent role in HTS. An interactive intelligent healthcare
and monitoring system (IIHMS) [6] is proposed to enhance the
portability and increase the popularization of HTS as shown in
Fig. 2. As a mobile-commerce observation system, IIHMS
aims to monitor patients, especially those with cardiovascular
disease, at any time and place.
To save cost and improve the quality of medical treatment;
a portable device capable of examining ECG signal anywhere
and anytime by itself must be developed. Fig. 2 illustrates the
scenarios of IIHMS heterogeneous networks, including a body

44

sensor network and a local sensor network [6] [9]. The IEEE
802.15.4 ZigBee simple protocol specification is suitable to the
body sensor network in a near-body application that provides
the communication between the acquisition auxiliaries and the
wearable device (e.g., watch). The local sensor network is the
intermediate medium between the wearable device and the
portable facility (e.g., mobile phone and PDA) for a simple data
analysis. In addition, the patient can send personal
identification and examination data to the healthcare center or
hospital over the internet or through wireless communication
systems. The local sensor network not only monitors personal
health, but also conveys the advice of the doctor.
The commercial components with low power for
bio-signal acquisition system (such as ECG signal) are difficult
to find for portability and durability application. Therefore, the
ECG acquisition circuits, a baseband processor, and an RF
front-end transmitter are intended to coordinate the low power
and high integration wireless bio-signal acquisition SoC
(WBSA-SoC); the system block diagram is shown in Fig. 3.
Once these data reach the ECG receiver, they can be displayed
on the graphical user interface on a PC or a portable device
(e.g., Advanced RISC (reduced instruction set computing)
Machine (ARM) based displayer). In particular, the ECG
coordinator located in the ECG receiver, which is also
controlled by the BioZigbee firmware, is responsible for the
transmission of the ECG signal to avoid collision [10]. The
WBSA-SoC is implemented in the TSMC 0.18-m standard
CMOS process to feature the low power and longevity
requirement.

III.

CIRCUITS IMPLEMENTATION OF WIRELESS BIO-SIGNAL

ACQUISITION SOC AND RECEIVER PLATFORM

The WBSA-SoC is divided into three parts: 1) the Wilson

circuit is employed to track the ECG signal [11]. Behind the
Wilson circuits is the ECG acquisition node responsibly to
amplify, filter, and digitize the ECG examination data; 2) an
RF front-end transmitter is employed to communicate with the
ECG received platform; and 3) an interface, including a
ZigBee digital processor and the mixed mode (MM) circuits, is
for processing the examination data.
A. ECG Acquisition Node
The analog front-end circuits integrate several
components containing: 1) a programmable gain preamplifier
to amplify a weak ECG signal whose amplitude is between
100 V and 4 mV [11]. The structure of differential difference
amplifier [12] and programmable gain amplifier circuits are
adapted for the first stage of the preamplifier circuit; 2) a
lowpass filter is apply to filter the high frequency noise which
the ladder structure with operational transconductance
amplifiers is constructed to implement the 4th Butterworth
OTA-C LPF [13]; 3) a post amplifier with the 2nd-stage
compensated gain amplifier is required to enhance the voltage
amplitude and to satisfy the dynamic range of ADC circuit;
and 4) An 8-bit resolution and a 1-kHz sampling frequency
successive approximation ADC (SA-ADC) is enough to
acquire the variable amplitude of ECG waveform with noisy
environment [13].
B. Baseband Processor
The ZigBee specification provides the worldwide
standard, is operated in an unlicensed 2.4GHz ISM band, for
short-distance wireless networks. The digitalized modulation
is O-QPSK which the chip rate and data rate are 2MHz and
250Kbps [7], respectively, is suitable to realize the baseband
protocol of proposed WBSA-SoC of the open protocol ZigBee
network topologies. The mixed mode (MM) circuits are the
interface between the ZigBee digital processor and the RF
front-end circuits, including a capacitor array DAC, an LPF
constructed by passive lump components, and a single to
differential converter (SDC) with an instrumentation amplifier
(IA) structure to convert the I-phase and Q-phase signals to
quadrature signals. The ZigBee digital modulation and mixed
mode circuits are constructed of the baseband communication
network. Moreover, the network is an interface connected with
an ECG acquisition circuits and an RF front-end transmitter,
which is responsible for transferring the digitize data to an
analog signal.
C. RF Transmitter
The architecture of low-IF RF transceiver for wireless
transmission can be divided into two non-coherent parts
contained; 1) an RF transmitter (Tx) includes an up-conversion
mixer with a double-balanced structure and a multi-tanh
doublet technique to overcome the linearity, a power amplifier
(PA) with a diode linearizer to extend the gain compression
[14]; 2) an RF receiver (Rx) with low-voltage low-power

45

design is incorporated with folded cascode down-conversion

mixer and current reused low noise amplifier (LNA) [13].
Currently, to achieve a highly integrated application-specific
integration circuits (ASICs), the quadrature voltage controlled
oscillator (Q-VCO) is employed in RF transmitter of wireless
bio-signal acquisition system-on-chip (WBSA-SoC) to
oscillate the local frequency (LO) [15].
IV.

MEASUREMENT RESULTS

The proposed WBSA-SoC has been integrated on a

single chip with the ECG acquisition node, the baseband
IQ-Modulation processor, and an RF front-end circuit. The
chip size of the WBSA-SoC is 33mm2 was fabricated in
TSMC 0.18-m standard CMOS process. Figures 4(a) and 4(b)
show the placement and the microphotograph, respectively.
Order to perform an ECG examination, the WBSA-SoC
hollow wire-bond onto printed circuit board (PCB) with gilded
was replaced of traditional ceramic package; the daughter
board is shown in Fig. 4 (c).
Corresponding to the system architecture shown in Fig. 3,
the measurement results of analog front-end circuits on the
real human body ECG examination are illustrated in Fig. 20.
The results are measured from each output node of the two
AFE partitions, including (a) the initial ECG output waveform
(Fig. 5 ECG_In+ and ECG_In-), the amplitude of R-Wave and
S-Wave interval (R-S interval) is approximation 4 mVR-S, and
(b) the output waveform of programmable gain preamplifier
(Fig. 5 PreAmp) and post amplifier (Fig. 5 PostAmp) whose
amplitudes of R-S interval are approximation 680 mVR-S and
1340 mVR-S, respectively. The measured conversion gains of
PGA and post amplifier are 44.6 dB and 50.5 dB, respectively.

(a)

(b)

(c)

Fig.4 (a) The layout placement of proposed WBSA-SoC, (b) the chip
microphotograph, and (c) the daughter board of WBSA-SoC

Fig.5 The measurement results of AFE circuits on the real human body

(a)

(b)

(c)

Fig.6. (a) The experiment environment setup, (b) the measurement result by real human body, and (c) the ECG bio-signal display in the ARM-based displayer

The ECG detection was using the WBSA-SoC daughter

board mounted upon the fully integration mother board, the
experiment environment as shown in Fig. 6(a). The real human
body ECG acquisition signal is translated from the Wilson
resistors with electric patches stuck on the right wrist, left
wrist, and left ankle; the oscilloscope is applied to pre-show
the ECG signal in each output node of AFE circuits including
auto-gain controlled preamplifier and post amplifier, the real
ECG detection was illustrated in Fig. 6 (b). After the ECG
signal have been acquired and digitalized, the data were
modulated and transmitted by the proposed WBSA-SoC
wireless transmission; moreover, if the radiation carrier
received from the ARM-based receiver platform, the signal
were processed by mixed-mode circuits with amplification and
digitalization, FPGA demodulation and ARM-based
demonstration. Fig. 6 (c) shown the ECG waveform displayed
by the ARM-based displayer.
V.

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]
[7]
[8]

CONCLUSION

An interactive intelligent healthcare and monitoring

system (IIHMS) including body sensor network (BSN) and
local sensor network has been presented. The wireless
bio-signal acquisition SoC (WBSA-SoC) for BSN application
is applied to acquire the real human body ECG signal via
IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee network communication. The high
integration WBSA-SoC including an ECG acquisition node, a
TX-Baseband processor with ZigBee protocol, a mix-mode
interface, and an RF transmitter have been designed and
implemented in TSMC 0.18-m standard CMOS process. In
addition, an ARM-based receiver platform with an RF receiver,
an analog to digital mixed mode board, an Offset-QPSK
digital demodulation with FPGA and ARM-based displayer to
demonstrate the ECG waveform. According to the real ECG
measurement results, the ECG can be acquired by the
proposed WBSA-SoC.

[9]

[10]

[11]
[12]

[13]

[14]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank the Chip Implementation Center
(CIC) and the National Science Council (NSC), Taiwan, R.O.C., under
Grants NSC101-2220-E-006-025, NSC101-2628-E-006-022, and NSC
101-3113-P-006-025, respectively, for their support of this work.

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