The Usage of Smartphones in Remote ECG Monitoring Scenarios

The rapid development of smartphones and their widespread integration in everyday living has prompted their usage in healthcare and medical applications. With the emergence of wireless communications and biomedical sensors, remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems are allowing for patient-centered healthcare services while improving quality of life and reducing hospitalization costs. Energy-efficiency of wireless sensor nodes and mobile devices is of high importance in RPM systems in order to ensure unobtrusive sensing and long-term monitoring, without interfering with patients daily activities. In this paper we tested the reliability of Android smartphone in terms of long-term monitoring, by measuring its power consumption. This study shows the trade-off between smartphone’s streaming of ECG signals and local processing operations. If basic ECG signals processing operations are moved to wireless sensor node, our results show that smartphone can be utilized for more advanced analysis without excessive resource consumption. In order to further lower the number of samples for transmission, Android smartphone was tested in real-time compressed sensing recovery scenario as well.