NEWS

IoT ECG made with BRIKI MBC

ECG Health belt | Meteca

Today on Meteca’s blog we would like to present one of the projects that we are working on with passion and commitment: we are making our MBC-WB module more and more compatible with the health sector, which now more than ever, is growing in importance.

So why this choice? We are going through difficult times when the monitoring of public health is essential to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Doctors and experts recommend regular checks to measure patients’ vital signs, in order to ascertain their state of health. Having a small, versatile, powerful, energy-saving device can be the key to producing new, intelligent objects that help us to simplify daily life.

Thanks to its high power-size ratio (it is machine-weldable, and 16x38mm in size), Meteca’s MBC-WB module is ideal for use in projects where lack of space could be a problem.

The presence of the two microcontrollers allows it to parallelize and improve the efficiency of the operations necessary for the acquisition of biological signals (such as ECG, respiration, SpO2, etc.), for their processing and for wireless transmission using protocols BT/BLE or Wi-Fi protocols. That’s how, thanks to this versatile and powerful architecture, it is possible to acquire signals known to have reduced intensity, without compromising the signal-to-noise ratio, while keeping the wireless interface active and, at the same time, allowing the processing of the signal itself.

To ensure maximum energy savings, as well as the ability to switch the ESP32 on and off entirely, the ESP32 being responsible for data processing and BT/BLE interface, a library has been created to manage the working frequencies, active and non-active peripherals, and in general the energy behaviour of SAMD21, in order to bring the consumption of the entire module in deep sleep to 5.7uA.

The example reported above helps us understand how we can lay the foundations for the creation of an IoT holter. The holter is a medical device that records the electrical activity of the heart for at least 24 hours by applying electrodes to the patient’s chest which are connected to a portable device (a small battery recorder). The holter made with the MBC-WB would be small (and therefore less “intrusive”) and able to transmit the patient’s data to the doctor in real time.

In addition to this, there are many applications that could be carried out, such as the production of small devices able to read the temperature and respiratory capacity of a patient and predict the occurrence of a potential case of SARS-Cov-2 infection. Other projects could include the detection of the vital signs of elderly patients, and the subsequent transmission of the acquired data to a server, for remote monitoring of their health, or the development of devices that can manage and dispense the correct dose of medicines for patients with chronic diseases. Another interesting idea is the creation of objects capable of detecting the degree of environmental noise (also known as noise Pollution) which a person is exposed to, and to correlate it with the stress value detection processed from the ECG signal analysis. 

In short, our MBC-WB has a great deal of potential and many possible applications: its use can help us to achieve important goals, while at the same time significantly reducing costs and saving time.

To learn more about our MBC-WB module and for further information, contact Meteca.