International Journal of Advanced Computational Engineering and Networking, ISSN: 2320-2106,

Volume-2, Issue-6, June-2014

REMOTE PATIENT MONITORING WITH WIRELESS

CONNECTIVITY
1

JAMSHID K, 2K. RAJASEKRAN, 3SHABNA V C

1,2,3

PG Scholar(Embeded System), Professor, PG Scholar(Network & Internet Engineering)

E-mail: Jamshi5@gmail.com, k_rajasekaran@karunya.edu, shbnvc6@gmail.com

Abstract- The Advent of Remote Patient Monitoring, recent advancements, innovations in sensors and low power wireless
technologies enables monitoring and diagnostics assistance to patients even in the remote areas. For better diagnostics,
Physicians need to monitor the vital signals of the patients continuously for hours. Current wired monitoring mechanisms
restricts the patients mobility during this time and there by diagnosed for a small period of time. In hospital ICUs, all the
signals are being monitored inside ICU itself, any alarm from system makes all the patients panic which has to be avoided
especially for cardiac patients. The developed wireless device addresses these two problems by transmitting the patients
ECG signal wirelessly which allows the monitoring of patient outside the ICU and even outside the clinical settings. A low
power portable battery operated device is developed to transmit the patients ECG signal wirelessly on licensed narrow band
healthcare spectrum. This receiver is interfaced with a web server and the ECG waveform is published in a webpage which
allows the remote monitoring and diagnosis outside the clinical settings.
Keywords- ECG, Remote Patient Monitoring, Wireless Transmission

I. INTRODUCTION
Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) allows the
continuous remote monitoring of elderly peoples,
patients having seizures, Cardiac diseases, with high
Blood Pressure (BP), high blood sugar, etc without
disturbing their personal life. According to US Census
Bureau, the global elderly population count is getting
increased every year.
Fig.1 Conventional Bedside ECG Monitor

This changes in the global population increases the

demand for the care old age people. Here, the Patient
monitoring system plays an important role in reducing
the human efforts. It helps in 24*7 monitoring of
patients which helps the physicians for better
diagnostics. It allows the patients to be monitored
outside clinical setting, even allowing then at their
own home. RPM helps in providing better monitoring
for antenatal care and even post operative monitoring.

For monitoring ECG, conventional clinical setting

employs wired bed side ECG monitors which restrict
the patient mobility. In hospital ICUs where about 24
beds are installed, the signal is monitored there itself.
This causes all the patients to be panic when any of the
system alerts, the situation become some more worse
in case of alarms at late nights. Introduction of
wireless monitoring addresses these two issues. It
provides the freedom of mobility to the patients while
being monitored. As the signal is monitored wirelessly
it can be monitored in nearby room providing a better
assistance to patients without alerting them about the
situation.

While implementing RPM applications a lot of

challenges such as low energy resources, limited
bandwidth, unstable wireless links, low computational
power and small memory has to be addressed.
This proposed system presents a reliable low power
wireless transmission mechanism for biomedical
signals for RPM which works on licensed narrowband
RF frequencies. This system provides the freedom of
mobility to the patients and being at their own house
instead of being strapped in hospital beds.

II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

ECG is one of the critical signal to be monitored for

Cardiac patients, etc. This project proposes the
monitoring of ECG over wireless transmission.
Fig 2. Overall System Architecture
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International Journal of Advanced Computational Engineering and Networking, ISSN: 2320-2106,

Our system makes use of a standard ECG amplifier to

acquire the ECG signal from patient. This acquired
analog signal converted to digital and is transmitted
wirelessly in licensed healthcare spectrum to the
nearby fixed receiver. The receiver will reproduce the
same analog waveform from the transmitter and is
given to the ECG display. The wireless transceiver is
enough powerful for transmitting the signal to nearby
monitoring room and allows monitoring without
disturbing the patient For RPM, at the receiver end, a
PC based web server is installed which can publish the
received signal on a webpage which allows the
real-time
monitoring
of
patient
through
Internet/Intranet. Thus RPM can be used to monitor a
patient even outside the clinical settings. It allows the
patients to be with their loved ones at their own homes
while being monitored.

Volume-2, Issue-6, June-2014

interfaced with ATMega16 to receive the signal. This

signal is extracted from the data packet by removing
the header and CRC. The checksum is calculated
again to verify about errors in received packet and is
fed to the display through an I2C based Digital to
Analog Convertor (DAC).
III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
A. Hardware Description
A battery powered standard low power wireless
transmission device for medical applications has to be
designed and developed. To suit wearable biomedical
applications, Texas Instruments MSP430G2553 is
chosen as it has low power modes which can extend
the life of battery operated portable devices and is used
for interfacing ADF7021V. A PCB is designed and
fabricated to suit various biomedical applications. The
device aims to transmit various biomedical signals
like ECG, Accelerometer, Bio-Impedence, etc.

Fig 3. Transmitter Block Diagram

A low power microcontroller MSP430 interfaced with

low power narrow band transceiver ADF7021V is
used for the transmission of signal.The ECG signal
from patient is filtered and amplified with a standard
ECG amplifier available. This signal is sampled
acquired by the in-built Analog to Digital Convertor
(ADC) of microcontroller with required sampling rate
and resolution. This acquired signal is then buffered,
packetized with required header and CRC and is
transmitted through the RF(Radio Frequency)
Interface. The transceiver should be configured as
transmitter with required baud rate, frequency,
bandwidth and tx power.

Fig 5. Fabricated Transmitter PCB

ADF7021V is a High performance, low power,

narrow-band transceiver
with external Voltage
Controlled Oscillator(VCO) with improved adjacent
channel power and adjacent channel rejection having
programmable IF bandwidth. It follows the FCC and
ETSI regulations for healthcare. ADF7021V requires
two separate interfaces, one for data transfer (RF
transmission)
and
other
for
configuring
daughterboard. SPI Interface is chosen for data
transfer as it allows different modulation schemes and
data rates. 16 registers of ADF7021 [reg0 to reg15]
have to be configured for efficient data transfer in both
transmitter and receiver end. Configuring registers
have to be done using 3 wire GPIO interface. As this is
not following any standard protocol, bit banking
method is used to configure these registers.

Fig 4. Receiver Block Diagram

In the receiver end, the RF receiver is configured to

receive the transmitted signal and is given to
microcontroller. Receive makes us of ADF7021-V

Fig 6. Transmitter with ADF7021V plugged in

Remote Patient Monitoring With Wireless Connectivity

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International Journal of Advanced Computational Engineering and Networking, ISSN: 2320-2106,

The hardware mechanism in automatic Sync Word

Detection (SWD) of ADF7021V allows the detection
of sync-word in the incoming data stream and thereby
to track the start of the data stream to be received.
Since power consumption is not critical at fixed
receiver end, ATMega16 is used to interface
ADF7021V at receiver end. An isolated level
convertor based on ADUM6402 and ADUM2250 is
used to interface between 5V ATmega16 and 3.3V
ADF7021V. The 40 pin ATMega16 is having various
interfaces like SPI, UART, I2C and can work
simultaneously. The ADF7021v provides the received
data via SPI interface and the ECG waveform is
displayed in ECG display using an I2C interfaced
DAC as in Fig 10. The same data is sent through
UART and is interfaced with a PC based server using
USB to UART convertor based on MCP2200 . The PC
makes use of LabVIEW software and plots the ECG
waveform and is published in a webpage as shown in
Fig 11. This makes the waveform available
throughout the Internet/Intranet and makes remote
monitoring possible.

Volume-2, Issue-6, June-2014

Fig 8.CRC Count displayed in LCD

D. Data Packet Format

Data is packetized with minimum overhead. With a
5byte header and 2 byte CRC which improves the
energy efficiency of system.
Preamble
2 Byte

Sync Word
Data
3 Byte
64 byte
Fig 9. Data Packet Format

CRC
2 byte

64 Byte data is framed with a 5 byte unique header and

two byte CRC. 16 bit preamble of 01010101 is
required to synchronize the receiver to receive the
data. The 24 bit sync word is a unique sync-word
which is stored in the receiver. The receiver hardware
will scan the stored 24bit sync-word in the incoming
bit stream and informs the processor if any match is
found. This helps the receiver to track the start of data
frame. Then the 64 byte data buffer followed by 16 bit
CRC.

B. Functional Description
The amplified Real time ECG signal is sampled at
1500Hz with 8bit resolution. Double Buffering
concept is used to avoid loss of data. The data is
sampled and is stored in a 64 byte buffer. Once the
buffer is filled by continuous 64 samples, the whole
buffer will be transmitted. While one buffer is being
filled, other buffer will be transmitted in parallel.
Transmission rate is configured at 14kbps in such a
way that, transmission of one buffer will be complete
before the next buffer got filled by new data.

E. Data reception

Fig 10. Displayed ECG waveform in CRO

Once the sync word is detected, the next 64 bytes and

CRC is received by the receiver. The CRC is verified
at receiver by calculating the CRC of received packet
and comparing with the received one. This data is
displayed through the display with the help of an I2C
based DAC. While reproducing the wave, to retain the
shape of wave, the samples are sent at the same
sampling rate of transmitter. Fig shows the
transmitted and received waveform displayed in CRO.
The Yellow wave(Bottom wave) shows the
transmitted wave and the Blue one(Top wave) shows
the received wave. The same rate is maintained while
transmitting data to LabVIEW server via UART-USB
interface using MCP2200. Fig shows the remotely
monitored ECG waveform using Internet Explorer.

Fig 7. Double Buffering of data

.
C. Data Integrity
Data integrity is maintained by CRC check, once the
buffer is filled in transmitter, a 16 bit CRC of the 64
byte buffer is calculated and is transmitted along with
the data. At the receiver, the CRC of the received
packet is again calculated and is compared with the
received CRC. If any mismatch in CRC is found and a
buzzer is activated. An LCD is interfaced to display
the no of received packets and packets with CRC
mismatch. The LCD display is shown in Fig 8.

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Volume-2, Issue-6, June-2014

CONCLUSION
This system presents a reliable low power wireless
transmission mechanism of biomedical signals for
RPM which works on licensed narrowband RF
frequencies. This system provides the freedom of
mobility to the patients instead of being strapped in
hospital beds for the monitoring of vital signals. As
the data is transmitted over licensed healthcare band,
unauthorized data access is prevented.

Fig 11.ECG waveform in webpage

IV. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

FUTURE WORK
With the interfaced LCD to the receiver, a
performance analysis of the system is done under
various conditions. The interfaced LCD shows the
total number of packets received and the no of packets
with CRC mismatch. The displayed CRC mismatches
are counted out of 1406 received packets.

As a future work, a routing protocol has to be

implemented in the frequency band of 868MHz by
utilizing the energy efficiency and performance of this
transceiver. Implementation of an ad-hoc based mesh
network will be a better choice for efficient utilization
of this transceiver.
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This performance analysis shows that the system is

suited best for the transmission of biomedical signals
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V. POWER CONSUMPTION

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The power consumption of the device is calculated

with different microcontroller and power consumption
is as shown in table. As transceiver is 3.3V TTL logic,
interfacing 5V microcontroller needs additional level
converting hardware. The system is found working at
a lowest power consumption of 175mA with MSP430
and can work continuously for 21hours with a 3.7Wh
Li-ion Samsung Battery. This allows the patient to be
monitored continuously without disturbing him even
for recharging the battery.

Table 2. Power Consumption

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International Journal of Advanced Computational Engineering and Networking, ISSN: 2320-2106,

[10] N. Vlajic, D. Stevanovic, G. Spanogiannopoulos. Strategies
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[12] ADF7021V Datasheet

[13] ADI ISM Link Protocol
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[15] MSP430 Datasheet

[16] MSP430 User Guide

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