Potential for extended battery life in mobile healthcare with Bluetooth low energy and signal compression

This paper addresses the problem of battery life in ambulatory systems for monitoring biomedical signals in the mobile healthcare environment. Specifically, the paper examines the potential power savings that may be obtained using the recently-introduced Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) specification, where wireless signal transmission is used between a wearable sensor, and a Body Area Network (BAN) hub e.g. a mobile phone. To demonstrate the potential savings, ambulatory monitoring of ECG for heart rate variability analysis is used as an example application, where the ECG signal is transmitted from the wearable sensor to the BAN hub. Furthermore, the paper also examines the additional savings that may be obtained using compression of the ECG signal prior to transmission. The analysis shows that using both compression and BLE has the potential to extend battery life by a factor of 8 compared to the current Bluetooth 3.0 standard.