Intelligent sensor node based a low power ECG monitoring system

Abstract

This paper presents a novel two-tier low power electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system which consists of a sensor nodes layer and a base station layer by employing a simple but effective Euclidean distance model. To save transmission power, a sensor node only transmits sensed data to a base station when the sensed data shows abnormality. For the low power implementation of the abnormality detection on a local power-hungry sensor node, we propose light-weight computation of Euclidean distance between a sensed ECG signal and a reference ECG signal. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can reduce power consumption by 39-57% of the sensor nodes and accordingly prolongs the lifetime of the whole monitoring system.