Real-Time Signal Processing for

Wearable Electrocardiogram Device

Healthcare ▪ Wearable ▪ Android app development ▪ Firmware development ▪ BLE

About
Noise can be harmful. Exposure to noise increases stress levels which leads to raised hear t
rate and blood pressure. The Universit y of East London had been conducting a study that
examined how exposure to noise may adversely af fect the cardiovascular systems of children
and adults.

To carr y out their research, the Research Center built a portable electrocardiogram (ECG)
device for the participants in the experiment. This device was designed to record hear t rate
and individual noise levels. With these records, researchers could analyze how dif ferent
noise levels af fect hear t rates and hear t rate variabilit y (HRV).

Request
The research team was looking for an experienced development company that could
build fi rmware for their ECG wearable device. They also needed to create an
application that could provide data visualization capabilities for fur ther heart rate
research.

Solution
Integra Sources provided fi rmware development so the ECG device could per form its
function: record the data from all its sensors and send this data to mobile phones via
Bluetooth where it is displayed in real time. We also provided Android mobile application
development for our client.

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 Technologies Used
▪ We used nRF51 with BLE 4.0 suppor t and Cortex-M0 core as MCU in this project.
▪ FreeRTOS was used for fi rmware development.
▪ The fi rmware was implemented using C/C++.
▪ Microsoft Visual Studio with Visual GDB plugin was used for fi rmware
implementation.
▪ The android application was implemented in the Android Studio using Java
language.
▪ The device has a microphone, ECG, accelerometer, and thermometer sensors.

How it works
Par ticipants in the experiment (children and adults) are equipped with a wearable ECG
device placed on their skin. As they go about their day, electrical impulses released by the
hear t are picked up, processed by the microprocessor and recorded. At the end of the day,
the par ticipants come back to the lab where the researchers take of f their ECG devices and
study the hear t's electrical activit y in response to environmental noise, including from road
traffi c and aircraft.

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 Challenges solved: Real-time data processing
The main job of the fi rmware is to enable data transfer from the wearable ECG device to
Android smar tphones via Bluetooth 4.0+ in real time. As soon as the data arrives at the
smar tphone, the GPS coordinates of the phone are added to the data package. The device
collects the data from the following sensors:
▪ CG: 250Hz
▪ Firmware development
▪ Accelerometer: 30Hz
The portable
▪ Thermometer: 1Hz electrocardiogram (ECG)
monitoring device is based
▪ Microphone: 11,2kHz on nRF51 board for
Bluetooth low energy.
We needed to implement a continuous data transfer. To ▪ Android app development
make it possible for the ECG device to keep the data when The app displays the status
of the connection: not
the connection with a smar tphone is lost, we implemented an connected, connecting, and
internal fl ash memor y. It's used as a buf fer for temporar y connected.
storage of data.

Another major tech challenge was related to the data transfer speed that Bluetooth channels
could handle. The required speed was 2MB/sec. But af ter we made our calculations, the
realistic speed appeared to be lower – 2-3KB/sec in that par ticular case. To optimize the
data transfer rate our team implemented compression achieved by encoder and decoder.

Result
With the wearable ECG device and a user-friendly mobile app, it became possible for the
scientists to perform their research and investigate the ef fects of noise exposure on children
and adults’ blood pressure and hear t health.

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 Real-time data transfer Continuous data transfer Data loss
speed

"Integra's team helped us clarify our requirements and change systems architecture to
achieve the final goal. I'd say that the flexibility and enthusiasm of both engineering and
management teams throughout the whole project were some of the things we value most in
our collaboration."
Dr. Sam Wass, Universit y of East London