DEVELOPMENT OF A WIRELESS TRANSMISSION SYSTEM FOR ECG SIGNALS USING IEEE802.15.4/ZIGBEE PROTOCOL

Abstract

Long time encountered by patients in the hospitals sometimes could be frustrating and dangerous in the case of emergency which is as a result of the process involved in data acquisition and transmission to the doctors for diagnosis and prescription. With the presence of modern technology, the stress suffered, and the time wasted could be solved by introducing a means of acquiring the data needed from the patient and wirelessly sent to the doctor even before patient-doctor encounter. This research work focuses on developing a system capable of transmitting data acquired from a patient to the doctor concerned prior to the patient-doctor encounter. This transmission system is based on Zigbee/IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is used as a test signal which was loaded into the Zigbee/IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver configured using the X-CTU software. The performance of the system was evaluated by a series of tests carried out in different locations which include an industrial building and a residential building. From the results obtained, it was observed that the received signal strength varied largely with the distance between the nodes and the nature of the environment, but the ECG packets remained intact within a range of 50m in the indoor and outdoor experiments. Interference between the ECG Zigbee transmissions and other close devices was also investigated and was found to occur only when co-channel frequencies are employed. A simulation on the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol was also carried out using Omnet/Maxim framework.