Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE

Engineering in Medicine and Biology 27th Annual Conference

Shanghai, China, September 1-4, 2005

A Wireless Physiological Signal Monitoring System with Integrated

Bluetooth and WiFi Technologies
Sung-Nien Yu and Jen-Chieh Cheng
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, R.O.C.

Abstract—This paper proposes a wireless patient monitoring
system which integrates Bluetooth and WiFi wireless
technologies. A wireless portable multi-parameter device was
designated to acquire physiological signals and transmit them to
a local server via Bluetooth wireless technology. Four kinds of
monitor units were designed to communicate via the WiFi
wireless technology, including a local monitor unit, a control
center, mobile devices (personal digital assistant; PDA), and a
web page. The use of various monitor units is intending to meet
different medical requirements for different medical personnel.
This system was demonstrated to promote the mobility and
flexibility for both the patients and the medical personnel, which
further improves the quality of health care.
Keywords—Physiological monitoring system; Wireless;
Bluetooth; WiFi.
technology and the Bluetooth wireless technology to
telemonitor patients continuously. In this paper, we propose a
wireless patient monitoring system which integrates the WiFi
wireless technology and the Bluetooth wireless technology.
Through the portable Bluetooth wireless physiological signal
acquisition device, patients can move freely in the room and
the medical personnel can monitor the patient’s health status
remotely through the control center, the mobile device or the
web page via the WiFi wireless technology. In the
consequence, the physiological monitoring system becomes
more efficient and mobile.
II. METHODOLOGY
A. System Overview

I. INTRODUCTION The objective of this study is to design and implement a

wireless physiological monitoring system for monitoring
With the increase of senior population in the human society, vital signs remotely to promote the mobility of both the
continuous health monitoring becomes progressively more patients and the medical personnel. Fig. 1 shows the
important in the health care facilities. The medical personnel architecture of the proposed system. The proposed system
need to monitor the patient’s status in case of an emergency consists mainly of two parts: 1) the mobile unit, which is set
but would not desire to increase the number of room visits. As up on the patient’s side to acquire the patient’s physiological
a result, there is a demand of a physiological monitoring signals, and 2) the monitor units, which enable the medical
system which enables the medical personnel to monitor the personnel to monitor the patient’s status remotely.
patient’s status remotely and accurately. The mobile unit has several requirements that should be
The fast development of wireless technologies and the followed: 1) it should be portable and lightweight; 2) it
increases in communication bandwidth facilitate the should be able to acquire multi-physiological signals; 3) it
developments of e-health and telemedical systems [1]. should support wireless communication, which enables
Wireless and portable patient monitoring systems not only patients active freely.
increase the mobility of patients and medical personnel but
also improve the quality of health care [2]. In the
developments of remote patient monitoring systems, many
researchers have focused on transmitting physiological
signals via the wireless local area network (WLAN)
technology [3] and the Bluetooth wireless technology [4].
Some researchers have used the personal digital assistant
(PDA) to acquire and transmit physiological signals from
patient’s room to the central management unit in the hospital
using the wireless technologies [3, 4].
Bluetooth wireless technology is an open specification that
enables low-power and short-range wireless connections.
WLAN technology is also known as WiFi wireless
technology, which is a progressive open specification that
enables longer-range connections. Few, if any, attempts have
been made to integrate the wireless local area network (WiFi)
Fig. 1. Architecture of the proposed system

0-7803-8740-6/05/$20.00 ©2005 IEEE. 2203

 Several monitor units are designated in the proposed
system to meet the medical personnel different clinical
requirements. These units include a local monitor unit, a
control center monitor, a web page monitor, and several
mobile device monitor units. With the wireless transmission
capacity of the mobile units, the medical personnel can
monitor the patient’s physiological signals and access the
patient’s file from different monitor units. The monitor units
have several requirements that should be followed: 1) it
should be convenient for the medical personnel to access; 2) it
should be able to monitor the physiological parameters and
waveforms of the remote patients; 3) a database may be
needed to integrate with certain monitor units to save the
patients’ signals and files.

B. Mobile Unit Fig. 2. Diagram of the mobile unit.

The main function of the mobile unit is to acquire the
vital-sign signals and allow the patient to move around in the
room. The signals acquired include a one-lead ECG and a
breath signal. Fig. 2 shows the diagram of the mobile unit.
First, the acquired signals are passed through instrumentation
pre-amplifiers and filter circuits in the biomedical signal
processing block. 0.5-50Hz band-pass filters are used to filter
out the power-line noise to achieve better SNR ratio. Then
through the amplifiers and the analog-to-digital converters Fig. 3. Architecture of the tiny OS.
(ADCs), the signals can be amplified with a total gain of 1000
and digitized to 8-bit data.
An AT89C51 microprocessor (Atmel Co., LTD., San Jose
CA., USA) was embedded in the circuit and a tiny operating
system (OS) was developed to control the peripheral circuits
and the transmission of the digitized data [5]. Fig. 3 shows the
architecture of the tiny OS, in which three interrupt services
and three routine tasks were programmed to operate the
mobile unit. When operating in a specific interrupt service
routine (ISR), the corresponding flag is set up. The scheduler
checks the flags of the tasks and decides which task to
execute if more than one interrupts occur at the same time.
The digitized vital-sign signals are transmitted to the local
monitor unit using a Bluetooth dongle (Chander Electronics
Co., LTD., Taipei, Taiwan). This dongle supports the serial Fig. 4. Picture of the mobile unit.
port (UART) profile [6]. The max data rate is 720 Kbps and
the operation rage is within 10 meters. Fig. 4 depicts the
physical circuit of the mobile unit.

C. Monitor Units
The monitor units consist of several kinds of applications,
including 1) the local monitor application, 2) the mobile
device monitor application, 3) the control center monitor
application, and 4) the web page monitor application. Fig. 5
shows the architecture of the monitor units in the proposed
system.
The local monitor unit is located in the patient’s room,
which enables the doctor to monitor the patient’s health status
during the room visits and transmits the signals to the control
Fig. 5. Architecture of the monitor units.
center via the WiFi network. The control center unit is

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situated at the nurse’s station, which allows the medical
personnel to monitor the patient’s health status remotely and
the patient’s information, such as vital-sign signals, personal
information, and doctor’s diagnosis.
The mobile device monitor application is built on a
personal digital assistant (PDA). With this unit, the medical
personnel can monitor the patient’s health status right away.
Through the web page, doctors can monitor the patient’s
status and check records with any regular web page browser.
These two monitor units increase the mobility and flexibility
for the medical personnel to monitor the patient’s status at
almost anywhere once they can connect to network services.

III. RESULTS

A prototype of the proposed system architecture has been

developed. Efforts have been contributed to the development
of user-friendly graphical user interfaces. Fig. 6. The user interface of the local monitor unit.
The local monitor unit serves the data bridging function
between the mobile unit and the other monitor units. The
local monitor unit receives and displays the vital-sign signals
form the mobile unit via the Bluetooth network and then
transmits them to the other remote monitoring units. Fig. 6
shows the user interface of the local monitor unit. The
waveforms of the ECG and breathing signal are shown on the
screen. Also shown are the patient’s information, heart rate,
breath rate, and local time.
The control center is built on an IBM compatible personal
computer. The software and the user interface are
programmed by Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows XP platform.
An MS-MDB database is integrated with the software
program to manage the waveform data and the patients’
clinical records. Fig. 7 shows the user interface of the control
center. The same waveforms and information are transmitted
from the local monitor unit and displayed on the screen. In
addition to its monitoring function, the control center
provides the ability to archive and retrieve old records from
the database through the graphical user interface.
The mobile device is built up with a personal digital Fig. 7. The user interface of the control center.
assistant (PDA) (CASSIOPEIA E-200, Casio Computer Co.,
LTD., Tokyo, Japan). The user interface is programmed by
Embedded Visual Basic 3.0 on a Pocket PC 2002 platform.
Fig. 8 shows the front-panel of the mobile device. Due to the
limitation of the screen size of the mobile device, we program
the buttons to toggle the display of different vital-sign signals
such that only one waveform is displays at one time.
Moreover, the waveforms are displayed on the longitudinal
direction of the screen in order to have better resolution.
In the web page monitor application, the user interface is
programmed by ActiveX documents that can be accessed
with regular web page browsers. When the medical personnel
connects to the control center server via either regular LAN
or WiFi network, the web page browser, such as Internet
Fig. 8. The picture of the mobile device.
Explore (IE), can download and execute the ActiveX controls
automatically

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automatically and produce the web page for telemonitoring
the patient’s status. Fig. 9 shows the user interface of the web
page, which is similar to what can be observed on the local
monitor unit. The web page monitor application fulfills the
need to monitor the patients’ status and records at any place
where an internet service is accessible. In the consequence, it
extends the range of this monitoring system to almost
anywhere, although network delays may be inevitable.

IV. DISCUSSION

In this paper, a prototype of a wireless physiological signal

monitoring system using Bluetooth and WiFi technologies
has been proposed. For a wireless physiological monitoring
system, there are some points that should be addressed and
discussed.

A. Mobility

With the proposed system architecture, the patients are

allowed to move freely in the room and the physiological
signals can be acquire and transmitted through the portable
Bluetooth wireless device. This system also provides the
medical personnel the mobile device monitor units to
telemonitor the patients’ statuses through WiFi network.
Therefore, with the combination of Bluetooth and WiFi
networks, the proposed system highly promotes the mobility
for both the patients and the medical personnel.
B. Flexibility
Fig. 9. The user interface of the web page.
patient and transmit the data through Bluetooth wireless
technology. Several monitor units were designated on
different platforms to meet different clinical needs in
monitoring and archiving patients’ records. With the
combination of WiFi and Bluetooth wireless technologies
and the development of different monitor units, this system
highly improves the mobility, flexibility, and usability of the
wireless physiological signal monitoring system.

The physiological monitoring system provides different ACKNOWLEDGMENT

monitor units for different clinical purposes. This system
architecture increases the flexibility of this system. Moreover,
this system based on the WiFi network and Bluetooth
network is highly flexible and can be easily connected.
Besides, according to the fast development of wireless
technologies and the increasing communication bandwidth,
we can expect that more wireless services will be provided
and can be readily incorporated into the telemedicine services
in the future.
C. Usability
The proposed system is designated with user-friendly
interfaces. Both the mobile unit and the monitor units provide
easy-to-use user-interfaces, which facilitate the usability of
this system and reduce the need of a long-time-training before
usage.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a novel wireless physiological monitoring
system was proposed and implemented. This system
integrates the WiFi wireless technology and the Bluetooth
wireless technology to effectively monitor the patients’
statuses remotely. A portable physiological signal acquisition
device was developed which acquires vital-signals from the
This study was supported in part by the grant
NSC92-2622-E-194-016-CC3 from the National Science
Council, Taiwan, R.O.C.
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