The Design of Mobile EeG Monitoring System

Jihong Chai
School ofElectronic and Communication Engineering
Shenzhen Polytechnic
Shenzhen Xiii Lake Shenzhen Polytechnic, Shenzhen, China
chaijih @szptedu.cn

Abstract-With the increasing requirements of mobile ECG

monitoring, a convenient mobile ECG monitoring system
solution is proposed in this paper. The monitoring terminal is
designed by using MSP430 to achieve ECG signal acquisition,
amplification and AID conversion. CC2540 integrating low­
power Bluetooth 4.0 BLE-Stack is also used. System has the
function of mobile ECG data transmission from the monitoring
terminal to the smart phone. This design can use in home
healthcare, community healthcare due to the characteristics of
low power consumption, small size and reliability.

Keywords: ECG monitoring, Bluetooth, mobile health, CC2540

I. INTRODUCTION

Patients are difficult to rush to the hospital in time for

effective ECG detection because the cardiovascular disease
always outbreaks randomly. In recent years, the research of
mobile ECG monitoring system has very broad application
Figure 1. Mobile ECG monitoring system diagram.
prospects.
In this paper, a solution of convenient mobile ECG III. ECG MONITORING TERMINAL
monitoring system is proposed. ECG data is gathered by the
portable ECG monitor, and then is transmitted to the smart The hardware of ECG Monitoring Terminal is composed of
phone by the protocol of low-power Bluetooth 4.0. ECG data is three units namely ECG amplification and filtering circuit
ultimately transmitted to the health records management module, MSP430 main processing module and CC2540
platform of remote doctors via 3G mobile communication Bluetooth communication module. The hardware circuit
networks. So the interactive mobile health service could be diagram is shown as Figure 2.
realized. This article focuses on the system's network
architecture, the implementation of Bluetooth 4.0 using
CC2540, and the function of the health mobile phone based on ECG
MCU CC2540
Android[ll. Detect Pre-amplifier
MSP430 B1uetooth 4.0
Electrode Filter Module
FG439
II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION

The system is composed of three parts, including ECG Figure 2. ECG Monitoring Terminal circuit diagram.
Monitoring Terminal, Health Smart Phone and Health Records
Management Platform, shown as Figure 1. ECG Monitoring A. ECG Amplification and Filtering Circuit Module
Terminal achieves ECG amplification, signal filtering, and AID
The core of monitor terminal is microcontroller
conversion, and etc by using low-power microprocessor
MSP430FG439. It is a 16-bit processor. It has features of
MSP430[21. The ECG signal is transmitted to Health Smart
upper low power consumption, and high integration. To
Phone by the protocol of low-power Bluetooth 4.0. Health Smart
reduce the product volume, the design of signal amplification
Phone is designed based on the microprocessor of ARM series,
circuit makes full use of its internal integrated operational
and Android operating system is embedded in it Health Smart
amplifier.
Phone can log on the healthcare server to search health records.
The process of signal processing begins with the weak
The doctor could give health guidance to Health Smart Phone of
ECG signal collected on the electrodes. The pre-amplifier is
the patient via 3G mobile communication networks. Therefore
made of CMOS instrumentation amplifier INA321. The gain
the two-way communication between doctors and patients could
is 5. There is a 50Hz filter following the pre-amplifier, which
be easily achieved anytime and anywhere.
eliminate 50Hz interference effectively. The internal

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operational amplifier of MSP430FG439 provides the maj ority
amplification. It has the gain of 100 with a total gain is 5 X
100=500. The amplitude of ECG is high enough to implement
analog-to-digital conversion. The ECG signal is transmitted to
Health Smart Phone by the protocol of low-power Bluetooth
4.0 after the l2-bit AID converter.
B. MSP430 main processing module
ECG Monitoring Terminal is characterized by
miniaturization and portability, so MSP430 main processing
module is responsible for ECG signal acquisition, analog
amplification, AID conversion, and Bluetooth wireless
communication module. The amplified ECG signal is
internally fed to the on-chip analog-to-digital converter
ADC12 input channel AI. The ADC12 samples the ECG
signal with a sampling frequency of 512 Hz.
C. CC2540 Bluetooth communication module
The MCU CC2540 is used in the Bluetooth communication
module of ECG Monitoring Terminal to realize the protocol of
Bluetooth 4.0. Bluetooth radio front-end, Bluetooth protocol
stack, microprocessor, memory, ADC, and etc are all integrated
on a single chip. CC2540 is equipped with three low-power
operating modes to meet low-power requirements.
The layered software architecture of protocol stack of
Bluetooth 4.0 BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) is shown in
figure 3. BLE-Stack is divided into two parts including the
BLE-stack files and the OSAL (Operating System Abstraction
Layer) system. BLE-Stack makes all layers together and forms
library functions for the user to call. OSAL i � a kind of small
operating system with task allocation function[Jj.
Figure 3. Software structure of BLE.
1) GAP(Generic Access Profile) Layer ofBLE-Stack:
GAP is the top layer of BLE-Stack, and it closely links the
underlying protocol stack and applications layer. It is the core
lay to connect Bluetooth device.GAP defines four kinds of
device roles namely Broadcaster, Observer, Peripheral and
Central. In this system, ECG Monitoring Terminal is defined as
Peripheral to send datagram and response the connection
initiated by Health smart phone which is defined as Central.
Therefore, we must first initialize the device settings to defme
roles.
Secondly, connection parameters of Bluetooth
communication should be configured regardless of the device
roles. Specific parameters are Connection interval, Slave
latency and Supervision timeout.
Two devices can establish a connection when connection
parameters are determined. The connection between the Low-
power Bluetooth devices is initiated by the Central. But the
Peripheral needs to fust send a datagram including device
address and some other information (such as device name) in
order to let the Central know that it is a connected device. The
Central sends 'Scan Request' after it receives this datagram,
and then the Peripheral replies 'Scan Response'. The Central
sends 'Connect Request' after it receives 'Scan Response', and
then the Peripheral replies 'Connect Response'. Thus, the
Bluetooth connection between ECG Monitoring Terminal and
Health Smart Phone is completed.
The specific function calls are as follows: The Central
initiates the scan, and it can receive the data packet SCAN-RSP
including the parameters of the Peripheral if the Peripheral is
scanned. Then the Central will initialize the Peripheral, and
start 'Device Found' by calling API function of
GAP DeviceDiscoveryRequestO.The Central starts to establish
a connection by calling API function of EstablishLinkRequesO.
2) GATT(Generic Attribute Profile) Layer of BLE-Stack:
The application data communication between two devices
is achieved through the GATT layer of BLE-Stack.GATT
defmes two kinds of roles namely Server and Client. Because
the ECG data is supplied by ECG Monitoring Terminal, so
ECG Monitoring Terminal is defmed as Server and a service
named 'ECG Monitor' is added to it. On the other hand, Health
Smart Phone is defmed as Client.
The Bluetooth connection between ECG Monitoring
Terminal and Health Smart Phone is established in GAP layer.
In GATT layer, ECG Monitoring Terminal as a server calls
API function of GATTServApp_RegisterServiceO to add a
new service named 'ECG Monitor' and store the basic
parameters of the service in an array of structures list. Health
Smart Phone as Client finds service by calling API function of
GATT DiscPrimaryServiceByUUIDO and access to service by
calling- API function of GATT_ReadUsingCharUUIDO.
Therefore the transmission of ECG data is completed.
3) Software design ofOSAL(Operating System Abstraction
Layer) system:
OSAL, which is a small operating system upon BLE-Stack,
is responsible for the management of data transmission in
application layer and for task creation, task scheduling, task
synchronization and allocation of mutual exclusion resource.
Preemptive task scheduling strategy is used for different
priority tasks and Time division task scheduling strategy is
used for the same priority tasks. OSAL applies event-driven
polling mechanism which greatly degrades the system power
consumption.
The function of ECG Monitoring Terminal is that ECG data
is collectted by the main processing module MSP430 and ECG
data is sent to CC2540 via data signal line of UART, and then
ECG data is transmitted to Health Smart Phone via Bluetooth
4.0 by CC2540. Therefore the software design of CC2540
includes two function modules: Data Receive by UART and
Data Transmission by Bluetooth.OSAL main program
workflow is composed of two phases, initialization and starting
tasks polling, which is shown in figure 4.

Initialize GAP layer, configure .
Peripheral and other parameters....
Initialize GATT layer, define ....
Server and other parameters+'
Initialize OSAL system, Jefine two tasks:
Task_UartData and Task_BlueToothData.
Figure 4. OSAL main program flow chart.
Firstly, OSAL initialization consists of software system
initialization and hardware resources initialization. Software
system initialization comprises some initialization of variables,
event tables and function tables of tasks and other data
structures. All tasks should be initialized. There are some
system tasks which are defIned by each BLE-Stack layer
including LL, HAL, GAP, GATT, and SM. There are two user­
defmed tasks, the one is the task to transfer data via Bluetooth
named as 'Task_BlueToothData', and the other is the task to
receive data from UART named as 'Task UartData'. In the
initialization function of Task_BlueToothData, the roles of the
Peripheral and the Server are defIned, and other transmission
parameters of GAP layer or GATT layer are confIgured. An
Event of SBP_START_DEVICE_EVT in operating system
virtualization layer is set to trigger connection confIguration
initialization of GAP layer. So that ECG Monitoring Tenninal
could be discoverable to receive and respond to request of scan
and connection from the Central and establish a connection. In
the initialization function of Task_UartData, the UART
resources are initialized including setting Baud rate to
115200bps and enabling UART interrupt. The initialization of
the hardware resource is relatively simple, such as the
initialization of RAM, Flash, Timer, and so on.
After successful system initialization, System performs
the function of osal_start_system () to start the OSAL system
and polls tasks into the task table. When detecting the interrupt
event of UART port, system schedules the task of
Task UartData and calls the function of serial read data
achieved by BLE-Stack, so that ECG data could be received
from MSP430 and then sent to the Health Smart Phone via
Bluetooth protocol. When detecting the interrupt event of
Bluetooth RF port, system schedules the task of
Task BlueToothData in order to receive command from
Health Smart Phone.
IV. HEALTH SMART PHONE
The Health smart phone is responsible for receiving the
ECG data from ECG monitoring tenninal and signal processing,
storage, display and transmission of ECG data, There are 5
functional modules of the smart phone including the Bluetooth
communication module, the signal processing module, the
interface display module, and the 3G transmission module.
A. Bluetooth communication module
Bluetooth communication module is mainly responsible for
establishing Bluetooth wireless connection between ECG
monitoring terminal and the smart phone, Firstly Bluetooth
permission is needed to be declared in the fIle of
AndroidManifest.xml. Then get a Bluetooth adapter and turn
on the Bluetooth function. Search the ECG monitoring tenninal
in the paired Bluetooth devices, and a new device search
procedure will be started if the target device is not found. In
order to establish a Bluetooth connection, the underlying
communication capabilities are set for the Bluetooth device. At
last the user-defmed communication protocol is applied to
complete ECG data transceiver.
B. Signal processing module
Signal processing module completes the real-time fIltering
pretreatment of ECG data, and extracts waveform
characteristics and then calculates heart rate parameters. The
wavefonn analysis method of the combination of time domain
and frequency domain is used in this paper. Integer coeffIcients
comb fIlter band-pass fIltering to realize 50Hz notch fIltering.
Move window and integration method is used to enhance the
QRS complex wave. Five o'clock differential is used for
further weakening the P wave and T wave. Finally, the QRS
complex wave energy is enhanced by the integral square and
the R wave can be accurately located combined with the
integrated waveform and the original waveform especially for
high amplitude and long QRS interval ECG data[41.
C. Interface display module and 3G transmission module
Interface display module takes charge of displaying ECG
waveform and heart rate parameters. Due to the need to have
ECG data sent with high accuracy, timeliness and effIciency,
3G transmission module is designed. When ECG wavefonn is
steady, click the send button and switch into 3G transmission
module, Then real-time transmission of ECG is achieved
through the mobile communication medium. After the ECG
data is transferred, user information should also be inputted
into the mobile phone. Therefore health parameters can be
stored in the remote database on the health records
management platform in order to make it easier for doctors to
diagnose. On the other hand, the doctor could feedback the
diagnose device to the user's smart phone.
V. CONCLUS10N
In this paper, a new solution of mobile ECG monitoring
system based on Bluetooth 4.0 and Android system is proposed
This system takes full advantage of the on-chip operation
amplifIer of MSP430FG439 and the transmission convenience
and low power consumption of CC2540. The smart phone
based on Android system is used as the communications
gateway. Therefore the ECG data could be easily transferred to
the remote doctors via 3G mobile communication networks.
Users can effectively receive professional medical diagnosis [2 ] Yu Xuefei, "Theory and Design of Modern medcal instrumentation,"
South China University of technology Press,vol. I,2008.
and treatment recommendations anywhere and anytime.
[ 3] n, 2. 4-GHz Bluetooth low energy System-on-Chip,2011.
[4] Bo Zou and Jihong Chai, "The Design of the ECG Tele-monitoring
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