Long battery runtime is one of the most wanted properties of wearable sensor systems. The sampling rate has an high impact on the power consumption. However, defining a sufficient sampling rate, especially for cutting edge mobile sensors is difficult. Often, a high sampling rate, up to four times higher than necessary, is chosen as a precaution. Especially for biomedical sensor applications many contradictory recommendations exist, how to select the appropriate sample rate. They all are motivated from one point of view - the signal quality. In this paper we motivate to keep the sampling rate as low as possible. Therefore we reviewed common algorithms for biomedical signal processing. For each algorithm the number of operations depending on the data rate has been estimated. The Bachmann-Landau notation has been used to evaluate the computational complexity in dependency of the sampling rate. We found linear, logarithmic, quadratic and cubic dependencies

Everything in nature tries to reach the lowest possible energy level. Therefore any natural or artificial system must have the ability to adjust itself to the changing requirements of its surrounding environment. In this paper we address this issue by an ECG sensor designed to be adjustable during runtime, having the ability to reduce the power consumption at cost of the informational content. Accessible for everyone, standard ECG hardware and open source software has been used to realize an ECG processing system for wearable applications. The average power consumption has been measured for each mode of operation. Finally we take conclusion to conciser context-aware scaling as key feature to address the energy issue of wearable sensor systems