Energy Efficient QRS Detection Method for Wearable Wireless ECG Body Sensors - A Review

The ECG monitoring is the course of monitoring to find any irregularities in the heart beat rate of the person being investigated in the health checkups. With the rise of the rise of the technology, body wearable sensors are coming into existence and they are being used to live monitor the patients heath using regular ECG monitoring on medical database server in many countries or hospitals. The body wearable sensors are usually connected to the medical databases using cellular networks, Wi-Fi or zigbee like mediums (for the controlled environments). The patients can not monitor their heart rates, but they have to become dependent on the medical database officials or the server sending updates on fixed time intervals which may be weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Sometimes, when patient is out of network coverage, and the buffer memory completely goes full, the ECG data drops due the limited buffer memory on the ECG sensor device. This flaw can be corrected using the smart phone connectivity between ECG sensor and smart phone. In this research, we are proposing the solution based on the connectivity between ECG sensor and smart phone. An energy efficient heart rate detection (QRS-detection) algorithm for the smart phones will be developed along with the buffer handler. The smart phone will be also used to forward the ECG data to the medical database. Our research will facilitate the patient to monitor his/her heart beat rate live using smart phone. Also the ECG data will be forwarded to the medical database using the smart phone. The new algorithm will consume the less memory in comparison to the existing QRS detection algorithms.