Development of Low Power Wearable
Physiological Signal Monitoring System
Apsara B, Bashyam S and Ramachandran B
Department of Electronics and Communication
SRM University
KATTANKULATHUR-603201
TAMIL NADU
INDIA
e-mail: apsara_b@srmuniv.edu.in, bashyam.s@ktr.srmuniv.ac.in and
ramachandran.b@ktr.srmuniv.ac.in
Abstract— The system which monitors the various
physiological signal plays a vital role in diagnosing the
diseases of a patient in time. Wireless transmission of
Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal enables the mobility of the
patient and doctor. The device captures and provides the
ECG data across networks which can be continuously
monitored through any display device in real-time. The
proposed wearable device contains a wireless transmission
device that will transmit the processed ECG signal data to
the remote recipient, this will assist the doctors to monitor
the patients continuously without actually being in front of
them. The real-time data transmission through the wireless
media is implemented using Bluetooth module. The
technology used in the transmission of these data through the
wearable device can be optimized for lower power
consumption and better efficiency. The proposed research
focuses on providing the reliable and efficient monitoring of
physiological signal.
Keywords: Electrocardiography, Bluetooth, Mobile health
care, Remote Patient Monitoring.
1. INTRODUCTION
Better patient care is the need of the hour for
developing countries like India, China, etc., as they tend
to have a huge number of patients with the lack of proper
healthcare infrastructure along with the deficient
personnel. Some patients lack even the basic amenities in
the hospitals, particularly in the rural parts of the country.
To overcome this challenge at least a minimum standard
of care needs to be assured for the patient and then evolve
into best possible care for them. The minimum standard of
care can be ensured using the modernized healthcare
system as they provide better healthcare services to people
at low cost and provide services at anytime and anywhere.
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is one of the
examples of a modernized health care system which
monitors the patient’s vitals at a remote place. The doctor
can keep track of the patient’s health at any time. This
proves to cost advantageous as they use modern
telecommunication technologies, bio-instrumentation, and
978-1-5090-5913-3/17/$31.00 2017
c IEEE 92
computers, which are getting cheaper and cheaper with
improving performance. RPM can increase the efficiency
of the existing healthcare system as healthcare personnel
can track more patients at the same time. Moreover, RPM
can be very much useful for people of old age as the
growth of old age population increases with growing
population.
Death due to cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) is of the
highest order and it is the number one cause of death in
the world [1]. CVDs are a collection of diseases involving
the heart and blood vessels of which some are rheumatic
heart disease, coronary heart disease, etc. To prevent
cardiovascular diseases ECG plays a key role in the
diagnosis and treatment of the disease and studies indicate
that ECG may also be helpful in evaluating the risk of
CVD in patients who show no symptoms of the disease.
So, one of the important vitals to measure when comes to
patient monitoring is the Electro Cardio Graph (ECG). It
is very much helpful in diagnosing numerous heart-related
diseases. Moreover, it can be a life saver as it confirms the
diagnosis of a heart attack and at the same time
determines the type of heart attack which is very much
helpful in providing effective treatment to the patients.
In this article, ECG is monitored through a small and
portable device built using an AD8232 sensor or ECG
sensor which operates at 3.2V. The data obtained as ECG
wave is transmitted through Bluetooth technology. The
motive behind adapting Bluetooth in this work is for its
significance of low power consumption and simplicity.
The ECG wave can then be monitored on a laptop or a
smartphone. The device built is very small and can fit in
the palm of a person and also the device works on low
power. This paper first details some of the related research
carried out on the measurement of ECG and proceeds to
elaborate the architecture of the system which lists the
type of components used in the system and its working
principle. The implementation of the system is then
discussed alongside its working principle with the results
analyzed under the final section.
 2. RELATED WORKS sensor that utilizes near field communication which
ECG measurement is quintessential for a real-time involves 0.18um CMOS IC technology with a sensitivity
patient monitoring system so this has gained traction and of -13 dBm and an asynchronous 8-bit ECG readout and
brought novel ideas in the measurement and transfer of backscattering data transmission at 402 MHz [4]. The
ECG waves. Vega Pradana, et.al. puts forward a wearable system outperformed existing system by sensitivity, (-
non-contact armband which consisted of capacitive- 13dBm) data rate (90kbps), power consumption (9.7ȝW)
coupled electrodes embedded into it [2]. Bluetooth low and area (1.9mmx2mm).
energy (BLE) module is used to transmit the ECG data. Apart from the design of transducer and sensors Danilo
The proposed armband provided error rate of less than Pani, et al introduced new material to be used as
10% when compared with the existing system. electrodes in the measurement of wearable ECG
Yang Yang, et al proposed a transducer for a Real- monitoring systems [5]. The proposed textile electrodes
Time Remote Patient Monitoring system which includes outperformed dry Ag/cl electrodes in terms of PSD,
an ECG detection circuit with a new three-stage amplitude Baseline wandering, sensitivity, Positive predictability.
modulation transmitter which up-converts the obtained Also, some of the system which addresses the
ECG signal to a 2.4-GHZ carrier frequency [3]. The physiological monitoring systems and techniques [6]-[10]
proposed transducer can be useful in demodulating the are compared in Table 1. The systems presented in the
ECG signals from the transmitted signal. literature has reliable monitoring of signals at the cost of
more complexity of hardware/ software and high power
consumption. In this paper, a low power wearable
Table 1. ECG monitoring system and techniques physiological monitoring system is proposed.
S.No Paper details Contribution
Real-time wireless Physiological signals 3. ARCHITECTURE OF THE SYSTEM
health monitoring are monitored in real
1
Application using time through mobile
mobile devices [6] device.
Implementation of a Portable ECG devices
portable device for with digital filter-driven
real-time ECG signal hardware architecture
2
analysis [7] produce 95.1%
sensitivity and 95.9%
specificity.
A vector-free ECG Methods to extract the
interpretation with P, ECG features is
QRS & T waves as compared and
unbalanced transitions demonstrated. The
3 between stable interpretation of ECG
configurations of the wave is analyzed and
heart electric field explored with different
during P-R, S-T & T-P ECG extraction
Figure 1. Circuit diagram of the device.
segments [8] parameters.
Smart wearable body Different types of
The device to be used in the measurement of ECG
sensors for patient self- sensors are compared to
consists of ECG sensor AD8232, a Bluetooth module HC
4 assessment and check the compatibility
05, ATmega 328 and a power source of 5V. Figure 1
monitoring [9] with telemedicine
shows the circuit diagram of the system. Each of the
application.
components working and functionality is described below.
The Hardware- A non-invasive remote
software Package for wireless diagnosis of 3.1. ECG sensor AD8232
Long-term Wireless cardiovascular system
5 The AD832 is used as ECG sensor which is used to
Remote Monitoring of (CVS) diseases is
measure the electrical activity of the heart. The input is
A Cardiovascular proposed.
given through the electrodes which are placed at different
System [10]
locations of the body. The output obtained is an analog
reading which can be used to plot the waveform of the
Andre L. Mansano, Yongjia Li, Sumit Bagga and ECG. For the operation of this sensor 5 pins are essential.
Wouter A. Serdijn introduced an independent wireless

2017 International Conference on Nextgen Electronic Technologies 93

They are SDN, LO+, LO-, OUTPUT, 3.3V, GND. The
main feature of the sensor is that it is very much cost
effective, smaller in size apart from this it operates at low
power.
3.2. Bluetooth module HC05
The module used for wireless communication is HC05
Bluetooth module and Bluetooth SPP (Serial Port
Protocol) module is easy to use. The main feature of the
module is that it can be either used as a master or as a
slave which is fundamental in wireless communication. It
is fully qualified Bluetooth V2.0+EDR (Enhanced Data
Rate) with 3Mbps modulation with 2.4 GHz radio
transceiver and baseband. It is useful for low power
operations and consists of 6 pins. The dimension of the
module is 12.7mmx27mm.
3.3. ATmega 328/p
ATmega 328/p is a single-chip low-power CMOS 8-bit
microcontroller which is commonly used for applications
that require cost effectiveness, simplicity, high performing
and low power solutions [11]. Some of the characteristic
features are it is based on advanced RISC architecture that
executes powerful instructions in a single clock cycle. It
operates in the voltage range of 1.8 to 5.5V. It
provides 32Kbytes of In-System programmable flash with
read-while-write capabilities, 1Kbytes EEPROM 2Kbytes
SRAM, 23 I/O lines, 32 general purpose working register.
3.4. Electrodes
Three electrodes are used which are connected to the
ECG AD8232 sensor. The three electrodes are namely
right arm, left arm, left leg and the monitor will display
the bipolar leads. The three electrodes are placed
respectively and then the ECG is monitored through the
display.
4. IMPLEMENTATION
Figure 2. Portable ECG monitoring device.
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Measuring of ECG is done by implementing a test bed
initially to check the working of components proper
connections. The test bed consists of a breadboard along
with the components mentioned above. First, the
components are tested individually, a 9V battery, a crystal
oscillator of 16 MHz and a LED is connected to the
board, the 9V battery provides the power to the circuit
which is divided by using a voltage divider circuit and the
crystal oscillator is essential for the ATmega 328/p
microcontroller. A program to make LED flash is
uploaded to the ATmega 328/p microcontroller and
tested. Then the Bluetooth module is tested by a sample
program in which a signal given to the module will turn
off the LED and the transmission of a signal from the
Bluetooth is tested by viewing the signal in a serial
monitor. This test ensures that the HC05 module can act
as both master and slave. Once the Bluetooth module is
tested, the ECG sensor is tested by connecting it with the
ATmega 328/p with the program to display the values of
electrodes onto serial monitor.
Upon verifying the component’s working, a program
needs to be written to get the ECG values from the
electrode and the Bluetooth HC-05 module needs to
transmit the values, for which the programming is done in
Arduino IDE. The program is then compiled and uploaded
to the ATmega 328/p microcontroller. After uploading the
program, the connections of the individual components is
given in the breadboard as shown in Figure 1 and is
tested. The electrodes are connected to the body of an
individual. The ECG sensor will record the values and
transfer them to the Bluetooth module. The Bluetooth
module will then transmit the value to the display of a
laptop, using a serial plotter. The values are plotted and
ECG wave is obtained. After successful testing in the test
bed, the design needs to be done in Printed Circuit Board
(PCB). The main objective of the design is compactness
of the device for an easy portability. So some space saving
measures were carried out the components were soldered
accordingly as shown in Figure 2. The device was then
attempted to test its proper working mechanism.
5. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The electrodes were placed on the right arm, left arm
and left leg of an individual as shown in Figure 3, and the
ECG values were obtained using the device where the
ECG sensor sensed the values and transmitted the values
using Bluetooth module to the laptop. The values were
plotted using Arduino IDE’s serial plotter. The obtained
waveforms were monitored using a laptop that resulted as
shown in Figure 4. The obtained values and waveform can
also be uploaded to a web server in which the patient’s
ECG vitals can be accessed from anywhere around the
globe through internet.

Figure. 3. Reception of ECG signals from Electrodes.
In this work, ECG values were obtained from a patient
using the portable device developed and the values were
transmitted to the laptop using Bluetooth. The main
reason to opt for Bluetooth is that it is of low energy and
efficient for shorter range. Moreover, Bluetooth offers
higher level of security, so that the privacy of the
patient can be maintained. This work mainly focuses on
the development of low-power, portable and cheap device
for ECG monitoring. The values transmitted to the laptop
was plotted using Arduino serial plotter which falls on
accuracy as it plots the raw values with noise obtained
from the patient. To improve the accuracy of the device,
filters need to be used. Using filter circuits in the
hardware may complicate the system so filters need to be
applied through software. Many commercial software is
available that can provide better accuracy through the
application of the filter. Since the primary focus of this
paper is to develop a low-power and portable device to
measure ECG, the native serial plotter is used instead of
commercially available software.
Figure. 4. ECG wave obtained from the device.
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6. CONCLUSION
The development of low power wearable physiological
signal monitoring system was built using an ECG AD8232
sensor, ATmega 328/p and 3 lead electrodes. The HC05
Bluetooth is used for wireless transmission of ECG signal.
Though the accuracy level of ECG wave is moderate, the
filters and algorithms can be utilized to get accurate ECG
waveform and its extracted parameters. The device
proposed is simple, cost effective, low power
consumption and portable that can fit in a palm of an
individual. The acquired values and waveform can be
viewed through smartphones and laptops apart from this
they can also be viewed from anywhere once they are
uploaded to a web server. In the future, a patch antenna
can be incorporated in Bluetooth device which will
improve the transmission range of Bluetooth and
moreover a web server can also be designed to view the
waveform from anywhere around the globe.
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