Design Of The ECG Telemobitoring Terminal Based On Embedded Linux And GPRS

Objective:Heart disease is one of the most serious diseases that threat human health. Because of the paroxysm of heart disease, it is quite important to monitor electrocardiogram (ECG) signal at home. The purpose of this article is to design two basic parts for home portable ECG monitor with GPRS data transmission. The terminal can be applied to real-time acquisition, display, analysis and store of ECG data The terminal can establish two-way communication with monitoring center PC through GPRS.Methods:For hardware, it’s mainly about the core-controller module and GPRS module. The core-controller adopts S3C2440as the MCU, and expands ECG amplifier circuit, TFT touch screen and memory devices, and acompletes the amplification, filtering, ADC, display and storage of ECG data. The GPRS module, Q2403A, is communicated with S3C2440with UART, and is used to send ECG data to monitoring center through GPRS and Internet network. And as far as software is concerned, the design of software is based on embedded Linux, and system porting, device diver and applications are designed.Results:The ECG collecting module can collect and amplify the ECG data satisfactorily; the software designing based on the core-controller makes all the sources be used fully and multi-tasks run good. Performance testing of GPRS shows that this terminal can exactly transmit the ECG data.Conclusion:The terminal uses the micro-controller S3C2440which has an ARM920T core, contracts on both high speed and low power. The software base on embedded Linux concerns about the real-time acquisition of ECG, the multi-task requirement and the human-computer interaction, this makes the terminal have many functions and friendly to user. Embedded Linux programming, together with GPRS wireless technical establish a two-way connection between the terminal and remote monitoring center. This makes the monitoring center can receive the ECG data in time and user can get the feedback from monitoring center, and achieves the real telemonitoring of ECG.