Personal wearable monitor of the heart rate variability

The aim of the paper is to present a prototype of wearable heart rate variability (HRV) monitor. The home care surveillance and sleep assessment system is partly embedded into a smart home infrastructure and partly worn by a supervised person. The prototype wearable device is designed to acquire and process the electrocardiogram and to send reports accordingly to a programmed schedule. The recording, processing and transmission modes are programmable, what allows the recorder to respond immediately in case of predefined thresholds excess, while the regular reporting is organized in delayed packets exchanged during a short transmission session. This approach significantly reduces the contribution to the total power consumption from the communication module. The prototype was based on the PXA-270 development kit, but due to very low power consumption (0,5 mW) the migration to a more compact system is considered.