Development of a secure body area network for a wearable physiological monitoring system using a PSoC processor

Abstract

Wearable physiological monitoring systems have gained popularity in the recent years due to their ability to continuously monitor physiological signals, thereby making them suitable for home-healthcare applications. The electrocardiogram (ECG), phonocardiogram (PCG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals have been studied and it has been observed that there is a correlation between the three signals. This paper proposes the development of a secure body area network (BAN), for a wearable physiological monitoring system. The BAN is composed of three nodes, for ECG, PPG and PCG signals. The peak–peak distances of these signals are calculated first, in the coordinator of BAN. The coordinator is designed in such a manner that signals from it are transmitted to a monitoring station, only if the difference between the peak–peak distances of both ECG-PPG signals and ECG-PCG signals fall below a threshold. The entire operation of the coordinator is implemented using a real-time processor, Cypress^™ Programmable System on Chip (PSoC).

Keywords::

• Body area network
• Programmable System on Chip
• ECG
• PPG
• PCG
• Security

Acknowledgement

This research work is funded by SSN Internal Research Funding, Project No. IBM02/10.

Declaration of interest: There is no conflict of interest involved in this research work.