Analysis and Modeling of Selected Energy Consumption Factors for Embedded ECG Devices

Heart attack is a life threaten cardiac disease. Although advances in information and communication technologies have brought us tiny embedded electrocardiogram (ECG) devices and efficient algorithms to continuously monitor and analyze ECG signals, energy consumption of the system is a critical concern for practical usage. However, there have been not many studies focusing on energy consumption of mobile ECG monitoring, especially lacking guidelines in selecting proper data communication strategies and computational algorithms. In this paper, we examine three possible modes of data transmissions for energy consumption. A generic energy consumption model and a simulated environment were developed to examine the influence of different communication strategies and ventricular fibrillation detection methods in terms of computational efficiency and power consumption. This paper shows that the total ratio of energy saving between mode transmitting all data and our proposed event transmission is up to 84.67% per 508 s of data segment.