Wireless electrocardiogram transmission based on ultra wideband radio

Sammanfattning: Ultra wideband (UWB) communications has been a subject of much discussion over the last decade. The method of UWB has had a hard time to establish itself among other methods such as Bluetooth and WiFi but as internet of things (IoT) gains a foothold in our daily lives, UWB has presented some new application areas. These application areas are, among other things, self driving cars, energy efficient data transfer, health care applications, sensor networks and real time location systems. This project aims to use UWB communications to real-world applications, specifically, electrocardiography (ECG) - an application in health care in this project, and develop a prototype for the application. The prototype consists of two Android smart phones and two UWB modules (EVK1000 evaluation kits from DecaWave, Inc). Each smartphone connects a UWB module so that the two smart phones, one as sender and the other as receiver, can communicate directly through UWB radios. This is intended to serve as a proof-of-concept that UWB devices are well suited for short range data transfer applications. The result achieved by the project is an android application along with sending and receiving programs for the development boards by Decawave and additional information regarding UWB and its uses. The results also include a comparison of UWB, Bluetooth and WiFi as of todays standard. The goal of the project is to learn how android applications are programmed, how UWB is used in todays technology and how to program and use development boards presented by companies. The prototype has been built and shown that 12-lead simulated ECGsignals from the sender can be transfered to the receiver through the UWB communications. The work includes programming (in C) the two UWB modules for UWB communications, and Java for the android applications (programs) on the smart phones. The Android application is handling transmission of ECG signals to the sending UWB module and then receiving them from the receiving UWB module as well as displaying them on the receiver. The future work to continue the present project is to replace the sending smart phone by an ECG device that sends real ECG signals.