FPGA-BASED SMART HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEM WITH REAL-TIME IoT INTEGRATION AND WIRELESS DATA TRANSMISSION

Engineering

Microcontroller-based vital-sign monitors are cheap, but they struggle once you ask them to do real-time waveform analysis and wireless reporting at the same time. We wanted to know if pushing the heaviest part of that job — QRS detection — into reconfigurable hardware actually helps, or if it's more trouble than it's worth. So we built a prototype on a ZYBO Z7-20 board around a Zynq-7000 SoC. The programmable-logic side runs a streaming R-peak detector adapted from Pan-Tompkins; the on-chip ARM core does the rest — reads an NTC thermistor, packs the numbers, sends them over UART to an ESP8266 for display on a web page. Nothing exotic. We tested it two ways: first against simulator ECG traces, then on an actual person. The detector held up fine through motion noise in both cases, and once running, the whole loop settled into roughly one-second update cycles — a delay that, as far as we could tell, came almost entirely from the wireless reporting interval rather than the FPGA itself. Whether that makes SoC FPGAs the right choice for every wearable is a separate question, but for this kind of monitoring, the results suggest they land in a reasonable middle ground — more capable than a bare microcontroller, cheaper and smaller than clinical equipment.

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