Statistical performance evaluation of ECG transmission using wireless networks

Abstract

This paper presents simulation of the transmission of biomedical signals (using ECG signal as an example) over wireless networks. Investigation of the effect of channel impairments including SNR, pathloss exponent, path delay and network impairments such as packet loss probability; on the diagnosability of the received ECG signal are presented. The ECG signal is transmitted through a wireless network system composed of two communication protocols; an 802.15.4- ZigBee protocol and an 802.11b protocol. The performance of the transmission is evaluated using higher order statistics parameters such as kurtosis and Negative Entropy in addition to the common techniques such as the PRD, RMS and Cross Correlation.

Digitization of Electrocardiogram From Telemetry Prior to In-hospital Cardiac Arrest

“…The PRD is defined as: where x ( n ) is the original signal (heart rate measurement obtained by using digital ECG), x ˜ ( n ) is the reconstructed signal (heart rate measurement obtained by using digitized ECG signal), and N is the length of the window over which the PRD is calculated. Acceptable values of PRD have been reported as less than 8% or 10% (Gürkan, Güz, & Yarman, 2007; Shakhatreh, Gharaibeh, & Al-Zaben, 2013). The PRD provides a numerical measure of the residual rms error, which is defined as:…”

“…SNR was defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power, often expressed in decibels. SNR values should be greater than 30 dB (Shakhatreh et al, 2013).…”