Wearable Cardiovascular Monitoring System Design Using Human Body Communication

This paper presents a wearable system able to transmit a real-time electrocardiogram (ECG) from a chest device to a photoplethysmogram (PPG) device on a wristband using human body communication (HBC). The proposed communication system was designed based on wet electrodes body channel measurements and was implemented using off-the-shelf components and conductive fabric rather than the original wet electrodes. This work attempts to build a bridge between standard surface potential monitoring and smart clothing technologies. The transmission of the ECG using the body as a transmission media from the chest to wrist reached an average accuracy of 97.1% tested for three typical cardiovascular monitoring positions. This work demonstrates a fully wearable HBC system that can be considered for smart clothing technology. The effective data transfer rate was 468kbps using on-off-keying (OOK) centered at 30MHz.