A wearable, low-power, real-time ECG monitor for smart t-shirt and IoT healthcare applications

peer reviewedA wearable health monitoring system combined with Internet of Things (IoT) is going to be a promising alternative to the conventional healthcare systems. In this work, a small, flexible and wearable real-time electrocardiograph (ECG) monitoring system integrated on a T-shirt is proposed. It uses an off-the-shelf biopotential analog front end (AFE) chip, AD8232, to collect subjects’ ECG data with satisfactory quality. The collected ECG data are transmitted through Bluetooth low energy (BLE) to an end device for real-time display. A PC graphical user interface (GUI) and a smartphone application are designed for indoor and outdoor real-time visualisation respectively. The power consumption of the proposed wearable ECG monitoring system can be as low as 5.2 mW. Powered by a 240 mAh rechargeable battery, it can operate for more than 110 h continuously. To prolong the lifetime of the battery, a flexible solar energy harvester is also adopted within this system. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019