Energy-aware ECG sensing scheme for M-health applications

Wireless body sensor networks (WBSN), elected as a promising infrastructure for mobile health (m-health) applications and e-healthcare, are facing many challenges related to their powering and processing capabilities. In depth, the available hardware resources and energy embedded on these tiny body sensors, to record and transmit continuous streams of unprocessed biosignals, are limited and cannot ensure practical life time of the sensing system. An interesting approach for efficient energy body sensing is to extract relevant features of the signal at the source level and to transmit them instead of the sending continuous data. This paper focuses on the presentation of a low-power ECG sensing approach that is intended to extend the wireless body network life time. It discusses the design and the performance analysis of this approach. The obtained results attest about the efficiency of the proposed scheme for energy aware ECG sensing and its adequacy to be implemented in WBSN.