IoT for remote wireless electrophysiological monitoring: Proof of concept

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers integrated sensing of all aspects of daily life. The field of healthcare offers the greatest potential for IoT to benefit society, but also presents significant challenges. A key component of IoT is the development of intelligent ubiquitous sensing. Achieving this requires circuits and systems that require low power and efficient computation. As a proof of concept, we present a prototype design of a continuous wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring device that uses a small, low-cost IoT wi-fi module to upload real-time data to the cloud. Two IoT cloud services were evaluated to record and plot real-time ECG data: IBM Bluemix and ThingSpeak. Preliminary data quality was analyzed using kurtosis and spectral distribution ratio. Future development is necessary to improve battery power and to implement real-time data analysis. Remote medical and health monitoring is an important step in supporting personalized predictive analytics, smart homes, and chronic illness management. The presented device has the potential to provide health professionals with real-time ECG data allowing for diagnosis of cardiac pathologies, monitoring of patients suffering from heart disease and/or patients recovering from cardiac conditions.