EMBEDDED HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE DESIGN FOR LOW-POWER WIRELESS ECG DEVICE

Abstract

As personalized healthcare devices come into the mainstream of lifestyle gadgets, system engineers are challenged to design miniaturized devices that are power-aware, comfortable and intuitive to use. Arising from these challenges, this thesis focuses on the system level power optimization aspects of a CB (Classic Bluetooth) ECG device and a low-power BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) ECG device during continuous wireless transmission. The hardware of the CB ECG device is pre-designed and only the frequency scaling technique can be applied onto the MCU to reduce power. Through system-level power profiling, the power hotspots were identified to be the microcontroller and transceiver. A ground-up investigation on hardware and software design was carried out and an integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC) containing a microcontroller and transceiver was chosen for the BLE ECG device. It is also supported by a power management chip to reduce dynamic and static power dissipation. The SoC is also deployed with a lossless compression algorithm for further power reduction.