Development of a Low-Latency Wireless Telemetry System for Monitoring Patients Heart Rates

Telemetry systems provide a means to monitor the physical state of a machine, human beings, and environmental conditions. The need for a telemetry system arises due to the increasing desire to simultaneously monitor, measure and record critical data of patients located at different locations at optimal cost. Toward this end, a wireless telemetry system was designed and implemented, specially for small-scale medical applications, specifically, for proper monitoring of the heart-rates of mostly elderly patients. In order to enhance the capabilities of the system, an infrared-based pulse Oximeter sensor was designed and integrated into the telemetry system, and this sends the acquired data to an Arduino microcontroller for pre-processing. The controller sends the pre-processed data to a coordinator PC over a ZigBee mesh wireless network, via a graphical user interface (GUI). For seamless transfer of data from source to destination, a source routing algorithm was applied to route the desired data over the proposed ZigBee network. Thus, an optimized source routing algorithm was evolved, and applied to the telemetry system in order to lower the latency of data transmission of the nodes over the wireless network. Finally, the performance of the optimized routing algorithm was compared with the existing source routing algorithm, and the wired telemetry system. Results show that data routing through the wired telemetry has much lower latency among the investigated routing schemes, and the optimized source routing algorithm transmits data with substantial gains in throughput, and achieved average latency about half the latency of the source routing algorithm