A novel wireless three-pad ECG system for generating conventional 12-lead signals

• Main Author: Cao, Huasong
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2010
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/23741

A wireless body area network (WBAN) is a radio-frequency (RF) based wireless networking technology that interconnects tiny nodes in, on or around a human body. Typically, the transmissions of these nodes cover a short range of about 2 meters. This thesis presents a complete survey on recent advances in WBAN, including the market needs, channel modeling, standardization of low-layer communication protocols, quality-of-service (QoS) provisions, developments of sensors/actuators, WBAN architectures and experimental platforms. A recent work employing the nonbeacon-enabled mode of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for QoS provisions has motivated us to design a QoS framework based on the beacon-enabled mode of the same standard. The proposed QoS framework can better differentiate WBAN application traffic streams and serve periodic traffic more directly through the time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) based mechanism. A dominant feature of the proposed framework is the minimum adaptation to the existing standard, which makes it easy to adopt our platform and associated algorithms, as well as to implement them on off-the-shelf hardware platforms. Employing the proposed QoS framework, we propose a novel wireless three-pad electrocardiography (W3ECG) system. W3ECG furthers the pad design idea of single-pad wireless ECG systems. Inspired by the transformation possibility of signals obtained in vectorcardiographic (VCG) systems, we bring two more pads to the single-pad approach to gain spatial variety of the heart activity. Signals obtained from these three pads, plus the spatial information, make it possible to synthesize conventional 12-lead ECG signals. We have been able to manufacture the front-end ECG circuit, and combine it with an IEEE 802.15.4 hardware platform TelosB. Software for the server and pad has also been developed to make a fully running W3ECG possible. By explaining and evaluating our QoS platform designed for general WBAN applications, and our W3ECG system invented for particular healthcare area, we foresee a bright future for wide deployments of such kind of wireless networks on the human body. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of === Graduate