EEG AND ECG SENSORS IN MOBILE HEALTHCARE APPLICATION

Mobile healthcare has emerged and has been going strong in the past decade. It employs mobile technology to monitor human body vital signs to perform self-medical-diagnosis and outpatient care treatment. This non-traditional biomedical technology is valuable to biomedical engineering students. In this paper, I propose a project to allow students to have hands on experience in this emerging mobile health technology. The acquired knowledge and skill will place the students in the forefront of both biomedical engineering and internet era fields.

The proposed project consists of hardware and software parts and each part has two modules. The hardware consists of electrocardiogram (ECG) and electroencephalogram (EEG) circuit modules. The design and assembly of the ECG module can be expanded to synthesize the EEG circuit module. The software consists of wireless communication and mobile device display modules. Because of the complexity of the project, the four modules are spread into two quarter biomedical instrumentation classes. In the first class, the ECG and wireless communication modules will be assigned as the class project. The ECG module is made of input differential amplifier and a noise filter, which were learnt separately from previous classes. The wireless communication module requires students to write Bluetooth protocols to send signal from the ECG module to a Bluetooth wireless chip. In the second class, students will expand the ECG module to add a couple brain wave filters to form the EEG module. The overall system will be integrated with the Bluetooth communication chip. The ECG and or EEG signals will be transmitted through the Bluetooth chip to a mobile device. The final part of the project is to write a mobile device app which will accept the transmitted Bluetooth signals and display on a mobile device such as an Android phone or an iPad.

Individual ECG circuit, EEG circuit, wireless Bluetooth chip and mobile app were designed and demonstrated in scattered EE or independent study classes. The proposed project in this paper will combine all these modules into one integrated mobile healthcare unit.