Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Andrew Jurik
Chair: Marty Humphrey, John Stankovic
Advisor: Alfred Weaver
OLSSON 228E, 10:00:00
A Master's Thesis Presentation
Biotelemetry and Body Sensors: Enabling ECG Monitoring
ABSTRACT
As the population ages and the risk of chronic disease increases, the cost of healthcare will
rise. Technology for mobile telemetry could reduce cost and improve the efficiency of treatment.
In order to achieve these goals, we first need to overcome several technical challenges,
including sufficient system lifetime, high signal fidelity, and adequate security. In this
thesis we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Mobile Biotelemetric System
(MBS) that addresses these remote medical monitoring challenges. MBS comprises a custom
low-power sensor node that accurately collects and analyzes electrocardiogram (ECG) data, a
client service with a multifaceted policy engine that evaluates the data, and a web portal
interface for visualizing ECG data streams. MBS differs from other remote monitoring systems
primarily in the policy engine's ability to provide flexible, robust, and precise system
communication end-to-end and to enable tradeoffs in metrics such as power and transmission
frequency.
We show that, given a representative set of ECG signals, policies can be set to make the
operation of the hardware and software resilient against transient ECG conditions for both
security and monitoring purposes. We demonstrate that our system adaptively trades off
system-level metrics based on a combination of operating conditions and user input, and that our
heartbeat detection algorithm performs well for challenging ECG input. Further, we incorporate security mechanisms to safeguard our data and foil common attacks.