Remote Cardiac Activity Monitoring Using Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks

Pervasive human monitoring of various biological parameters is a growing field of interest. The focus of this research is to provide a step forward towards pervasive health monitoring. We describe a system to remotely monitor data from a patient´s electrocardiogram (ECG). The data is transferred to a central monitoring station via a wireless sensor network for display. Crossbow MICAz motes are used as the network nodes. One of the nodes is interfaced with a commercial 3-lead ECG module and others are used to route the data through the network. A graphical user interface is designed for monitoring the cardiac rhythm. The primary objective of this experiment is to wirelessly transmit streaming ECG data in real-time with high reliability and minimal packet loss. Test results indicate a high reception ratio while transmitting ECG data over multiple hops.