A Reconfigurable, Wearable, Wireless ECG System

New emerging concepts as ldquowireless hospitalrdquo, ldquomobile healthcarerdquo or ldquowearable telemonitoringrdquo require the development of bio-signal acquisition devices to be easily integrated into the clinical routine. In this work, we present a new system for electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition and its processing, with wireless transmission on demand (either the complete ECG or only one alarm message, just in case a pathological heart rate detected). Size and power consumption are optimized in order to provide mobility and comfort to the patient. We have designed a modular hardware system and an autonomous platform based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for developing and debugging. The modular approach allows to redesign the system in an easy way. Its adaptation to a new biomedical signal would only need small changes on it. The hardware system is composed of three layers that can be plugged/unplugged: communication layer, processing layer and sensor layer. In addition, we also present a general purpose end-user application developed for mobile phones or personal digital assistant devices (PDAs).