Wireless Patient Monitoring System - 6 Vital Parameter Monitoring
A dual-radio embedded system for continuous ECG, SpO₂, heart rate, respiration, cuffless blood pressure, and temperature monitoring — built for portable, all-day clinical use.
Project Overview
This project delivers a portable, clinical-grade patient monitor that tracks the full core vitals set — five-lead ECG, heart rate, SpO₂, respiration rate, cuffless blood pressure, and body temperature — without tethering the patient to a bedside chassis. Signals are acquired by dedicated analog front ends behind a fully isolated patient interface, then digitised and processed on-device.
The monitor streams live waveforms to a companion mobile app over Bluetooth Low Energy, while simultaneously publishing telemetry to a cloud dashboard over Wi-Fi and MQTT — giving clinicians both a bedside view and hospital-wide visibility from a single battery-powered device.
The Challenge
Conventional bedside monitors are mains-powered and wired, which limits patient mobility and leaves general wards under-monitored between vitals rounds. The core engineering challenge was building a portable device that keeps full diagnostic-grade ECG and adds continuous cuffless blood pressure, while still streaming waveform-quality data over two radios and lasting a full shift on one battery charge.
System Architecture
A galvanically isolated analog front-end island digitises ECG, SpO₂, respiration, and temperature at the patient. The host SoC filters the signals, computes each vital parameter, and evaluates alarms on-device. From there, data splits across two radios: Bluetooth carries low-latency waveforms to the bedside app, while Wi-Fi carries MQTT telemetry to the cloud dashboard — each radio handling only the traffic it's best suited for.
Key Features
Diagnostic 5-Lead ECG
Seven-vector ECG and derived respiration from a single isolated electrode set, with no extra patient leads.
Cuffless, Continuous Blood Pressure
Beat-to-beat BP estimation from pulse transit time and PPG morphology — no cuff, no extra hardware.
Dual-Radio Connectivity
BLE for immediate bedside waveform viewing; Wi-Fi + MQTT for cloud telemetry and central surveillance.
Patient-Isolated Design
A fully isolated applied-part island keeps the patient electrically separated from mains-referenced electronics.
All-Day Battery Life
24+ hours of continuous dual-radio operation on a single LiPo charge, aided by Wi-Fi power-save scheduling.
On-Device Alarms
Every alarm condition is evaluated and annunciated locally, so monitoring never depends on network reach.
Engineering Challenges We Solved
Diagnostic-grade ECG in a portable footprint
Microvolt-scale ECG signals demand isolation and shielding that a compact enclosure doesn't easily offer. We built a dedicated isolated front-end island so signal quality matched a bedside monitor without the bedside footprint.
Continuous blood pressure without a cuff
Oscillometric cuffs only sample intermittently. We derived a continuous BP estimate from signals the monitor already acquires — ECG timing and PPG waveform shape — removing the need for separate BP hardware.
Running two radios without draining the battery
Continuous Wi-Fi telemetry alongside BLE waveform streaming is a heavy power draw on a wearable-scale battery. We scheduled Wi-Fi transmission windows and arbitrated shared spectrum between the two radios to hit a full-shift runtime target.
Technologies Used
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