Bluetooth throughput measures for cardiomyocyte extracellular signal telemetry

In this contribution the suitability of the Bluetooth transmission system is analyzed for its application to the real-time transmission of cardiac signals captured by micro-electrode array sensors. The required data rates for this type of cardiac signals are calculated to be 180 kbps for every single micro-electrode. The mean throughput value varies with the selected packet size: for packet sizes less than 1000 bytes the mean throughput is smaller than 180 kbps while for packet sizes greater than 1000 bytes the mean throughput saturates at around 230 kbps. This mean throughput value is guaranteed for over 80% of the time. Compression algorithms running on the sensor array allow the reduction of the required data transmission rate. However, these algorithms result to be highly resource-consuming to achieve the required compression for the transmission of 64 cardiac signals over one Bluetooth channel. It is concluded that Bluetooth is hardly suitable for the transmission of signals from cardiomyocyte culture micro-electrode arrays.