VOL. 10, NO 20, NOVEMBER, 2015 ISSN 1819-6608 ARPN Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences ©2006-2015 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN). All rights reserved. www.arpnjournals.com 9442 THE EFFECT OF MESH NETWORK ON ECG DATA TRANSMISSION BY XBEE TOWARD THE DATA ERROR RATE Sugondo Hadiyoso 1 , Ratna Mayasari 2 and Achmad Rizal 2 1 Telkom Applied Science School, Telkom University, Bandung, Indonesia 2 School of Electrical Engineering, Telkom University, Bandung, Indonesia E-Mail: sugondo@telkomuniversity.ac.id ABSTRACT Wireless Sensor Node technology based on XBee radio can support peer-to-peer network topology, cluster tree and mesh. Implementation of network topology must be adjusted to the needs. The study conducted a comparative between peer to peer topology and mesh toward the behaviour of the data transmitted by electrocardiogram signal data acquisition device. The purpose is to determine the performance of XBee in real time application. After 4 scenario tests obtained, error happened when two or more nodes are connected to the coordinator with the numbers of average error for 1,000 data is 0.4 - 2.7. The other facts, error happened randomly and not linear with the number of sensor nodes. Keywords: mesh network, Xbee, ECG, error rate. 1. INTRODUCTION Multipoint applications or multiuser monitoring centralized system has been developed; one was applied on health service in hospitals. This monitoring system was applied to monitor the health condition of a patient who requires intensive care. One of the important parameters that describe someone's health is his heart condition that acquired using the ECG device. Previous research had conducted a study to monitor the condition of the heart using Android via WLAN [1]. Another study by Radian Sigit made a mini wireless of ECG to monitor the heart’s condition of athletes via Bluetooth [2]. The using of WLAN and Bluetooth will facilitate the development because it does not require additional software on the receiver since the module has been integrated on PC or smart phone; but it will be hard to apply on robust network for configuration settings on both modules. XBee module presents to solve the problem because it has the simple configuration for different network models and low power consumption. Research by A.R. Fikar, et al realize the PC based Wireless Vital Sign Monitor using ZigBee Communication with peer-to-peer configuration [3]. Almost similar research for vital signal monitoring system presented in [4]. The other study by Sugondo [5] had applied the ECG monitoring system for multi-user by using a mesh topology. However, both of the research was not discussed about the data behaviour on the network. After further observation and analysis, it found a problem on the mesh network application on XBee for real time data; the emergence of data errors. Therefore, this study discussed the rate of data errors on ECG monitoring application that had been done in previous studies. The results of this study can contributed to WSN study in real time applications and be a solution for the next study. There are some main contents of this paper; section II presents the description of the ECG, Mesh Topology, ZigBee and Error Rate. Section III describes briefly about the system design and implementation. Result and discussion are described in section IV followed by Conclusions in section V. 2. THEORY 2.1 Electrocardiograph Electrocardiograph (ECG) is a device that used to record the ECG signal [6]. Transcription of the electrical activity produced by the heart muscles is called an electrocardiogram or ECG signal. The normal ECG’s form can be seen in Figure-1. In this study, the device to record ECG signals placed on each node that integrated with a micro- controller as a medium for sending data to the coordinator via XBee. It will be discussed more clearly in section 3. Figure-1. Normal ECG signal [7].