Prototype of a patient monitoring device based on an embedded RISC/DSP system

Existing patient monitoring devices usually record long-term activity as raw data from the patient to some type of storage. This requires offline analysis on a physician's desktop for the recorded period. Clearly, longer moni- toring periods on the same storage are feasible, when doing analysis in real-time and storing only characteristic or critical results. This can then be used to even tell the wearer its health state or sound a public alarm on life threatening situations. In order to proof this concept and make the best from nowadays microelectronics devel- opments we chose to develop a battery operated, low power, high performance device utilizing Hyperstone's RISC/DSP developer board. This enables fast execution of state of the art algorithms on the DSP-side with speed advantage and multitasking of the RISC architecture. The prototypical device acquires 8 channel analog data with a maximum of 10 kHz sampling rate/channel running real-time ECG analysis. It will communicate with a central monitoring station with the help of a Bluetooth channel.