A Wearable Wireless Sensor for Cardiac Monitoring Jamal Ahmad Khan, Haroon Ali Akbar, Usama Pervaiz and Osman Hassan School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science NUST, H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan {12beejkhan, 12beehakbar, 12beeupervaiz, osman.hassan}@seecs.edu.pk Abstract— This paper presents a low cost, low power and wireless wearable solution for real-time analysis and monitoring of cardiac activity co-related with physical activity. Utilizing an analogue filter chain for signal conditioning, the device performs continuous measurement of the Electrocardiogram. The wearable also includes an accelerometer enabling it to detect the current physical activity along with body orientation. The device communicates wirelessly, using Bluetooth Smart /Bluetooth Low Energy, with a smart phone, where a complete analysis can be performed on the received data, and decisions about the current health conditions can be made. I. INTRODUCTION According to a recent estimate [1], by the end of 2017 wearable electronics will be facilitating 322.69 million lives around the globe . In everything from healthcare & lifestyle to everyday hassle, wearable devices are introducing newer concepts of convenience, costumer care and novelty. Par- ticularly, with more sophisticated sensing and analytical functionalities, the new generation of medical or clinical wearables is making unmatched growth with an annually rising share of 25-30% in the market [2]. The main moti- vation being to introduce remote and continuous monitoring of diseases via wearables and thus cater for the dearth of trained medical personnel and lack of available healthcare and thus try to save the loss of millions of lives each year Most of the physiological diseases encountered by human body have a specific effect on body vitals, like pulse rate, body temperature and blood pressure. Heart Failure, for instance, disrupts human electrocardiogram (ECG) and body skin temperature. Similarly congestive Heart Failure (CHF) is a condition in which the pumping power of the heart gets weaker than normal and this causes the blood to flow through your body slower providing lesser oxygen and nutrients to the body [3]. CHF causes 1 million hospitalizations annually in North America and Europe only and the impact in developing countries is more alarming [4]. [5] Fig. 1 shows the prevalence on CHF among different age groups for both genders. Medical supervision of a CHF patient is a highly careful procedure that is to be performed 24/7. Previously this was done using hefty ambulatory monitors or Holter monitors. Though it required highly trained staff, this method of supervision was impractical for long term supervision as it restricts the human body movement. Lack of monitoring facilities and an additional possibility of missing out on real time information of body vitals during daily activities of the patient out of the hospital called for a more accurate, portable Fig. 1: Prevalence of CHF among different age groups and easy-to-use medical equipment so that patients could be remotely and continuously monitored. A number of solutions have been developed to address the aforesaid problems. The commonly proposed solution is based on remote monitoring using wearable bio-sensors that transmit real-time information to the respective medical supervisor. However, to the best of our knowledge the introduction of IoT based wearable patches has not been carried out yet. The solution given in [6] doesn’t allow notifications to patient’s medical supervisor. Similarly the device described in [7] is expensive and does not support multiuser database and community sharing service. Finally [8], [9] and [10] provide web-based solutions only and do not provide real-time monitoring. In this paper we propose a wearable wireless sensor that is IoT compliant and provides, real-time remote monitoring of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients. These features are mainly achieved by single lead ECG acquisition along with activity detection using the on board accelerometer and the accompanying mobile application. The proposed solution ensures minimal body restrictions, supervisor notifications and community platform growth. In addition, due to it’s cost effectiveness a wider outreach is expected which will lead to timely disease diagnosis of patients. II. DESIGN METHODOLOGY As depicted in Fig.2 The wearable device consists of four main components i.e. ECG circuitry, Accelerometer, Temperature circuitry, Micro controller combined with BLE transceiver and an accompanying mobile application: 978-1-5090-3087-3/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE 61