Low-Power, Intelligent Sensor Hardware Interface for Medical Data Preprocessing

This work proposes an interface design of a low-power programmable system on chip for intelligent wireless sensor nodes to reduce the overall power consumption of the heart disease monitoring system, by lending them the capability of processing complex functions and performing rapid computations on a large amount of data at the node. This facilitates the node to intelligently monitor a medical signal for impending events instead of transmitting the signal to the base station constantly. Lowering the transmission data rate decreases the transmission power consumption in a node, thereby lengthening the node life and in turn increasing the reliability of the network. This work also implements a thresholding technique, which controls the data transmission rate depending on the value of the monitored signal, and a cardiac monitoring system that performs computations at the node for the detection of either a skipped heart beat or a reduced heart rate variability, in which event the signal is transmitted to the base station for monitoring/recording or alerting the crew. The performance analysis of the system shows that there are reductions in the system power consumption and data transmission rate, which in turn reduces the network traffic and averts congestion.