The Design Of A Wireless ECG Tele-Monitoring System

Recent year, heart disease, with high growth rate of incidence and fatality, has been one of the most dangerous diseases to people health. As the characteristics of cardiovascular disease, chanciness and paroxysm, it is very important to monitor patients in real time. At present, telephonic ECG monitoring (BP), computer supported ECG monitoring and Internet based telemonitoring system have been developed. But most of them are used in a limit environment. They can't monitor dynamically, for the cable communication. Therefore, this paper proposes a wireless ECG monitoring system. The patients wear a portable device, which collects ECG signals, and transfer alarm message and ECG waveform to the receiver via GPRS module when the ECG is abnormal. It's simple to operate and is suitable for those patients at home.The device's CPU is the S3C2410A with a core of ARM920T, and the Operating System is Linux RTOS. This paper describes hardware design in detail. The hardware consist of a minimum system including the CPU, the SDRAM and the NAND Flash, and I/O interfaces including the LCD display interface, the LAN port, the USB port, the serial port, the JTAG port and the GPRS module socket, as well as a power management scheme for portable device and ECG amplifier. Moreover, the paper gives an introduction of the composing and transplanting of Linux. The development of Bootloader and the customization of device drivers are also described. At last, the application software aimed to meet the system requirement is designed, which realizes dynamically monitoring.At the end of paper, the hardware and software of the system are tested. The results show that the system achieves the design target. The designed system can monitor the ECG signals in real time, and is reliable, interface friendly, easy to be extended. We give the shortcomings of the system and some solution of them.