Simulation of an optimized technique based on DS-CDMA for simultaneous transmission of multichannel biosignals

Abstract

Telemedicine is becoming increasingly, with applications in many areas of healthcare, such as home telecare of the elderly, diagnosis at a distance and robotic surgery. The simultaneous transmission of several leads of biomedical signals should be considered in telemedicine, given the many benefits it brings. Code division multiple access (CDMA) is a multiple access technique that enables users to transmit independent information simultaneously within the same bandwidth. The direct sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA) is a variant of the CDMA technique in which a pseudorandom sequence having a higher bandwidth than the information signal is used to modulate the information signal directly. Biomedical signals are confidential; thus, their transmission must be secured. In this paper we propose a protocol similar to DS-CDMA for the simultaneous transmission of all of the leads of some multichannel biomedical signals. We assigned orthogonal codes to different leads of a signal. The convolution of each lead with the code gives a signal spread over a broad frequency band. All of the spread signals are then mixed to produce a single composite signal. This composite signal is frequency modulated, amplified and transmitted. At the reception, inverse functions to the previous are developed to perform demodulation, demultiplexing and extraction of the physiological signals transmitted. We used the discrete Walsh functions as codes. The results obtained are satisfactory, even in situations where the noise disturbances are significant.