An Experimental Performance Evaluation and Compatibility Study of the Bluetooth Low Energy Based Platform for ECG Monitoring in WBANs

Abstract

A long term healthcare monitoring system requires battery operated devices with low-power technologies. Researchers tried to adapt various short-range technologies for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) in ubiquitous health monitoring. The classical Bluetooth is known for its greedy power consumption, IrDA and NFC require line-of-sight conditions, and ANT has weak coexistence features and interference issues. A typical choice remains ZigBee/6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 based solutions in WBANs because of their low-power consumption. However, the recently proposed Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) announced more compelling features in various aspects. Only few studies have been published supporting these claims on BLE. In this paper, we present a BLE based remote healthcare monitoring platform and we study its compatibility for ECG monitoring. ECG data requires continuous and real-time transmissions, making it particularly challenging for resource constrained devices. In our system, a BLE112 module from Bluegiga and a BLE USB dongle are used for WBAN. The performance of the system is evaluated experimentally and the results showed good potential of this proposed BLE platform in meeting the main QoS requirements of medical applications in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet error rate, while staying energy efficient.

ECG Monitoring Systems: Review, Architecture, Processes, and Key Challenges

“…Several reviewed ECG monitoring systems proposed solutions for lower energy consumption by reducing signal transmission, processing, and supporting signal compression. Most of the studies promoted the use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for signal transmission to support low energy consumption [126,155,[222][223][224][225][226][227][228][229][230][231][232]. Few other studies used alternative wireless methods to reduce transmission and eventually reduce power consumption [234,235].…”

Two thermocouples low power wireless sensors network

“…In many cases the Bluetooth, ZigBee and ANT technologies (protocols) used for transmitting data are neither necessary nor simple, and an energetically efficient radio module combined with simple communication protocol would be enough. Based on the research [14,18], comparison of peak power requirements for various technologies was provided, and for BLE is 12-15 mA, ANT -17 mA, ZigBee varies from 17.6 to 29 mA, LoRa -32 mA. Another research [15] regarding connection time was analysed.…”

Analysis and Improvement of Tennis Motion Recognition Algorithm Based on Human Body Sensor Network

“…WBAN integrates many cutting-edge technologies such as wireless communication, sensor data acquisition and processing, intelligent wearing and human health, which will bring great changes and impacts on human production and life in the future. It can be widely used in medical [10,11], physical rehabilitation [12][13][14], military [15,16], sports [17][18][19], and other fields. Especially in sports competition, WBAN is a network composed of sensor nodes with different functions that are reasonably distributed on sports facilities according to their respective needs and characteristics.…”