An ECG Monitor with Bluetooth Low Energy

Abstract

Though there have been a number of instruments for heart condition monitoring, few of them is suitable for individual portable use, which makes the expenditure of related healthcare extremely high with the increasing number of chronic patients. To meet the challenge, we develop a wireless personal electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system which is meant to be a portable, low cost, and easy operational device for use at home. The ECG sensor in the system is designed for recording electrocardiogram signal and transmitting it to a smartphone through the emerging short-range communication tech-nology, namely Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). An application is accordingly developed for smartphone terminals to receive the ECG signal via BLE, display the signal wave and transmit the data over the Internet to a web server. This project focuses on software de-velopment for the ECG sensor system. It realizes the ECG signal transmission using BLE and the ECG data transmission between the sampler and the BLE module using Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). Furthermore, a Universal Boot Loader (UBL) is also featured for easy firmware updates by customers in future use.