A Wi-Fi internet-of-things prototype for ECG monitoring by exploiting a novel compressed sensing method

This article presents an internet-of-things prototype consisting of a data acquisition device wirelessly connected to the internet via Wi-Fi for continuous ECG monitoring. The proposed system performs a novel compressed sensing-based method on ECG signals, with the aim of reducing the amount of transmitted data and thus realizing an efficient way of increasing the battery life of such devices. For the assessment of the energy consumption of the device, an experimental setup is arranged, and its description is presented. The evaluation of the reconstruction quality of the ECG signal in terms of the percentage of the root-mean-squared difference is reported for several compression ratios. The obtained experimental results clearly demonstrate high energy efficiency and the usefulness of the Wi-Fi-based internet-of-things device adopting the considered compressed sensing method for the data compression of ECG signals. Furthermore, it allows for the reduction of the energy consumption of the internet-of-things device by increasing the compression ratio without significantly degrading the quality of the reconstructed ECG signal.