Wireless ECG monitoring and alarm system using ZigBee

This paper presents the development of a system for wireless ECG monitoring and alarm using ZigBee. The system is intended for home use by patients that are not in a critical condition but need to be constant or periodically monitored by clinicians or family. Patient monitoring is the cornerstone of proper medical care. It provides clinicians the much needed information about a person's current health status, so that they can act accordingly if anything goes wrong. Nowadays, complex patient monitoring systems offer the possibility of continuously monitoring a multitude of biological signals, analyze them, interpret them and take the appropriate action; or alert clinicians if necessary. The usual shortcomings of most of these systems reside in affecting patient mobility and home comfort. A patient would need to be sitting on a bed wired to these devices in order for his vital signs to be monitored. This system measures, records and presents in real-time the electrical activity of the heart while preserving comfort of the patient. The device is built as a low-power, small-sized, low-cost solution suitable for monitoring elderly people at home or in a nursing facility without interfering with the daily activity of a patient. It should give sufficient information in real time, and make it available remotely. The intention is not to achieve perfect clinical accuracy but the device is able to detect anomalies in the measured data and it also has alerting features. Authorized observers (clinicians or family) can monitor at any moment the state of the patient through the internet.