Energy Saving on Constrained 12-Leads Real-Time ECG Monitoring

Continuous real-time electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring can detect arrhythmia and provide early warning for heart attacks. Effective power management signals and controlling the mode of operation to reduce the need for full fidelity ECG signal. This work studies the impact of the base-delta compression technique for different cardiac conditions on power consummation. It also aims to evaluate operational strategies and their effect on the battery life when the ECG patch can switch between different operating modes (e.g., varying the number of leads according to the cardiac conditions). We use a binary classifier to inform the decision of switching between different operational strategies. Both scenarios are evaluated in terms of execution time, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication airtime, power consumption, and energy-saving ratios on a Texas Instruments CC2650 Micro-controller Unit (MCU). We compare the performance of the base-delta compression and changing the mode of operation scenarios on various cardiac abnormalities. Performance evaluation shows that operational strategies outperforms data compression in power saving for normal ECG readings by a double fold. In contrast, operational strategies incurs an additional overhead of 1011 ms during an abnormal status. However, base-delta satisfies the embedded platform constraints on execution time and airtime with 25 ms and 20 ms, respectively in the MCU environment.