Vol. 01, No. 03, pp.

106 –111 (2020)

ISSN: 2708-0757

JOURNAL OF APPLIED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

www.jastt.org

Designing ECG Monitoring Healthcare System Based on

Internet of Things Blynk Application
Dathar Abas Hasan1* Ayad Ghany Ismaeel2

1
Shekhan Technical Institute, Duhok Polytechnic University, Duhok, Kurdistan, Iraq, [email protected]
2
President of Al-Kitab University, Alton Kupri, Kirkuk, Iraq, [email protected]
* Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract
Nowadays, heart diseases are considered to be the primary reasons for unexpected deaths. Thus, various medical devices have been
developed by engineers to diagnose and scrutinize various diseases. Healthcare has become one of the most substantial issues for both
individuals and government due to brisk growth in human population and medical expenditure. Many patients suffer from heart
problems causing some critical threats to their life, therefore they need continuous monitoring by a traditional monitoring system
such as Electrocardiographic (ECG) which is the most important technique used in measuring the electrical activity of the heart, this
technique is available only in the hospital which is very costly and far for remote patients. The development of wireless technologies
enables to build a network of connected devices via the internet. The proposed ECG monitoring system consists of AD8382 ECG
sensor to read patient's data, Arduino Uno, ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, and IoT Blynk application. The implementation of the proposed
ECG healthcare system enables the doctor to monitor the patient's remotely using IoT Blynk application installed on his smartphone
for processing and visualizing the patient's ECG signal. The monitoring process can be done at any time and anywhere without the
need for the hospital.

Keywords: ECG, IoT, AD8232, Arduino Uno, ESP8266, Blynk.

Received: June 25, 2020 / Accepted: July 28, 2020 / Online: July 31, 2020

I. INTRODUCTION The phrase "Internet of Things" IoT was used for the
The heart diseases are the main reason for the sudden first time in 1999 by Kevin Ashton during his works at
deaths and causes a high mortality around the world yearly. MIT's Media Center [5]. This concept is used to express the
Unfortunately, heart diseases patients are obligated to stay connection between the machines and computers through
at their home without making any potential that stress the sensors and using the internet as a mean to accept control
heart. However, most of the patients die before they get any commands and reporting status [6]. IoT is around for a long
treatment because they do not feel sick until the disease time but without a name, machine-to-machine (M2M) was
become at a critical stage [1]. Therefore, the physician has available for many decades and is the nearest concept to IoT.
to monitor the physical status of the patient’s heart There are many other names for IoT such as Ubiquitous
continuously to prevent any urgent relapse in heart status computing and internet of everything [7]. Generally, the
and then reducing the deaths. It is difficult to keep all heart term (IoT) refers to a dynamic and global network
patients in the hospital to monitor their status. Instead, infrastructure which consists of a large number of network
developing real-time monitoring healthcare system based on connections and computing capabilities extend to objects,
wireless technology is an effective solution for the physician sensors and everyday items not normally considered
to monitor their patients remotely [2]. computers [8]. These devices are allowed to generate,
consume and exchange data with a little human intervention.
The Electrocardiogram is physiological wave signal that The large-scale implementation of IoT transforms many
describes the electrical activity of the heart. It is generated aspects to the products such as home automation, energy
as a result of pumping and squeezing blood between the atria management devices, networked vehicles, intelligent traffic
and chamber inside the heart [3]. ECG enables the and health monitoring devices [9]. IoT brings great
physicians to determine the medical state of the heart by convenience to the healthcare field, especially for patient
measuring the time needed for the electrical signal to be monitoring and tracking management. Accelerated
travelled through the heart. ECG signal is measured using a development of the internet, cloud computing and Internet
set of electrodes that are placed non-surgically on the body integration of medical monitoring and management
surface to obtain information about the electrical activity platform provides new opportunities for the hospitals and
produced by the heart [4]. care centers to

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improve access and interconnection of devices used in first part is smart medical service, it collects data from the
healthcare [10]. Embedded technologies have an important sensors and analyzes it by raspberry pi then displaying the
role in delivering healthcare to people in separated and far results on the monitor.
locations by providing them with a monitoring system
which presents a continuous stream of accurate data for P.Kalaivani, et al. [16] aimed to provide a healthcare
better healthcare decisions. As the technology is to collect, system by designing a wireless patient monitoring system
analyze and transmit data, IoT continues to improve; the consisting of IR sensor for measuring the saline level and
IoT-driven healthcare applications and systems emerge [3, AD8232 ECG sensor to read the electrical activity of
11]. This paper utilized the IoT Blynk platform to present a patient's heart. Both sensors are connected to the Arduino
cost-effective, remotely used, easily equipped, and real-time Microcontroller, Arduino processes the data read by sensors
healthcare system for monitoring the ECG of the heart then display the result of saline level on LCD while the ECG
patients using Arduino Uno and. This system provides output signal can be visualized through a serial plotter or can
optimal solutions for heart patients that are living in remote be transmitted via Bluetooth module to be displayed on a
regions and having limited income. smartphone.

The rest of the paper is organized as follow. Section two Z. U. Abideen and M. A. Shah. [17] designed a robust
healthcare module consisting of five layers. The IoT sensors
focuses on the related works, and Section three describes the
system from three aspects: the system components, its data layer collects the data from sensors connected to the
acquisition, data processing, data transmission and data patient's body then sent it to the upper layer through the
visualization parts. In Section Four, we present the 6LoWPAN border router (6LBR) works as a gateway.
implementation steps and result visualization. Section five Network layer uses the advantage of 6LBR with wi-fi
discusses the obtained results and comparison with some interface, when the patient's wi-fi turned on, the 6LBR will
related works. Section Six gives the conclusions and future be connected directly to the internet via patient's smartphone
works. wi-fi to transmit the collected data to the server.
A. Kubal and C. K. [9] used the raspberry pi board with
II. RELATED WORKS four sensors to design an E-Health monitoring of the patient.
A. G. Ismaeel and E. K. Jabar. [12] intended to reach m- It collects patient's health data from these sensors through
health by designing a health care system for pregnant the configured GPIO port, then processes the data to get the
women using Mobile GIS. This system enables the pregnant health data on the graphical user interface webpage. This
woman which needs advice, revision and succoring (from page is locally hosted by raspberry pi, the page is displayed
their home) to register in maternity care center via the web when the healthcare provider connects to the raspberry pi
interface by sending SMS to the system server including her local IP address, therefore the doctor can monitor the health
ID, phone number, name, age, as well as locating the state of the patient easily on the internet browser.
position using a mobile built-in GPRS technique.
In summary, the related works discussed previously
B. M. Lee and J. Ouyang. [13] designed an intelligent don’t present an ECG healthcare system that has the four
service model for healthcare. A collaboration protocol has main features: real-time, low-cost, easy equipped and
been proposed to send and receive the factors related to the remotely used. Any healthcare with these four features will
risks between IoT healthcare devices. The collaboration be satisfied for the low-income and remote living heart
protocol is an application protocol consisting of many patients. The proposed healthcare system assists the
events which are applied to organize the flow of data physicians to follow the physical status of their patients at
between IoT's devices, the boot event initializes all the IoT's anytime and anywhere on using mobile phone or laptop.
devices in the system by broadcasting join message.
A. Ahamed et al. [14] implemented a low-cost ECG
monitoring system. This system consists of four units, an
ECG acquisition unit senses the patient's ECG data signal
by using the Bio Protech T716 electrode, this data is
transferred to the amplifier input. Signal conditioning unit
uses the AD620 amplifier as well as many other techniques
to get a pure data signal by amplifying the data signal and
reducing the noise.
B. Padmavathi and S. T. Rana. [8] designed and
implemented a framework for IoT based healthcare solution
based on cloud computing. This framework includes five Fig. 1. Flow Diagram of the Proposed System.
layers. Data processing layer identifies and locates the data
from sensor-based technology by using RFID, ZigBee, III. MATERIALS AND METHODS
NFC, Barcode technologies and digital cameras.
The proposed system consists of a set of hardware and
S.LAVANYA et al. [15] proposed a healthcare system software components that are interacted together to build the
based on IoT to collect the medical data of patient such as overall system. These components can be divided into four
heart rate and blood pressure using Raspberry Pi units, the data collecting unit that is responsible for reading
microcontroller. The heartbeat of the patient is measured heart activity signals from the human body, Arduino Uno
every 10 minutes at home. In case of an emergency, this microcontroller that processes the received data from ECG
system will send an alert to the patient's doctor by SMS in a probe, ESP Wi-Fi module that transmits the produced
fast and reliable way. This system consists of three parts, the information to the remote API application, and finally,

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Blynk IoT application that displays the received information of the value. AD8232 is connected with the Arduino Uno
on the mobile screen. Figure 1 shows the main four units microcontroller as illustrated in fig.3(b).
for the proposed system.
The proposed system performs the reading data,
processing data, sending data, and displaying data according
to the following flowchart shown in Figure 2.

a- AD8232 Module

b- Pins Layout

Fig. 3. Data Acquisition Components of the Proposed System.

B. Arduino UNO Microcontroller

Arduino UNO is the main processing unit utilized in our
proposed healthcare system that consists of ATmega328T
microchip as the microcontroller. Arduino UNO involves a
10-bit built-in analogue to digital (ADC) converter, which
reduces the system complexity and performs a vital role in
acquisition and processing analogue data signal from
AD8232 chip. For serial data transmission, Arduino UNO is
also equipped by a set of communication terminals. The
output data is transmitted from the AD8232 module to
Arduino by connecting the OUTPUT pin to A0 analogue pin
Fig. 2 . Flowchart of The Proposed System Architecture.
as shown in Figure 3(b). The data will be processed using
A. Data Acquisition A/D converter and USART as explained in [14] to transmit
the data serially via pin 2 and 3 to ESP8266 wi-fi module.
The essential components of the data acquisition unit are Figure 4 shows the connection layout between the Arduino
AD8232 chip and three adhesive electrodes terminals Uno microcontroller and the AD8232 model.
pointed as R for the right side, L for the left side and COM
as aground as shown in Figure 3(a). The main task of the
AD8232 chip is extracting, amplifying, and filtering the
small signals of the heart electrical activity when a noisy
condition occurs due to motion or remote electrode
placement. Signal conditioning is achieved using a bipolar
point high pass filter which is coupled with the instrument
amplifier structure. The AD8232 chip contains a
nonoperational amplifier that creates a three-pole low pass
filter as well as reducing the additional noise. AD8232
contains a fast recovery function, you can reduce the long
high pass filter to establish the long tail phenomenon. If the
amplifier rail voltage signal mutation (such as the lead out Fig. 4. Connection Between Arduino UNO and AD8232 Module.
of the case), AD8232 built in an amplifier for the right-side
driver (RLD) and other drive lead applications. AD8232 C. ESP8266 Wi-Fi module
will automatically adjust to a higher filter cutoff state. This
feature allows the AD8232 to achieve rapid recovery, and It is a self-contained system on chip (SOC) with an
thus the lead connection to the measurement of the object integrated TCP/IP protocol stack. The ESP8266 module
can be achieved as soon as possible after the measurement enables any microcontroller such as Arduino UNO to be
connected to Wi-fi access point which is already connected

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to the internet. The user has to be careful about the so that variation of the ECG data signal of the patients can
connection between the ESP8266 module and Arduino be visualized. The software is designed for performing this
UNO microcontroller. Figure 5 illustrates that TX and RX task. Figure 7 illustrates the experimental application of the
pins of ESP8266 module are connected to the digital pin proposed system components.
number 2 and 3 respectively in Arduino Uno. The power is
provided for ESP8266 module via the VCC 3v and GND
pins from of the Arduino Uno.

Fig. 7. The Proposed Work Connection.

The program code is written using Arduino IDE 1.8.5

environment, this code starting to prepare the necessary
library for ESP8266 module <ESP8266_Lib.h> and Blynk
Fig. 5. Connection Between Arduino UNO And ESP8266 Module. application <BlynkSimpleShieldEsp8266.h>. The ECG
analogue signals from the probe’s terminals are read
D. Blynk IoT Application through Arduino pin A0. The probe terminals have to be
placed properly at the specified part of the human body.
It is utilized to control hardware remotely, displaying Arduino processes the data by converting the analogue data
sensor data, storing data, visualizing it and performing many to digital information using Analog to digital conversion.
other tasks. As shown in Figure 6, Blynk consists of the The output data will be passed to the ESP8266 module
following major components: through pin 2 and pin 3. ESP8266 Module is connected to
the internet hotspot using the name of the hotspot (SSID)
and (PASSWORD) and then sending the data to the Blynk
application platform. Blynk IoT application receives the
data via the virtual channel (V5) to be visualized by a doctor
in his smartphone as shown in Figure 8.
V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The essential aim of the proposed system is minimizing
the time between the moment of getting patient's data and
displaying the results through Blynk application on the
physician phone or laptop. Figure 8 visualizes the ECG
signal of the patient’s heart. The x-axis of the wave signal
represents the time of reading the patient’s heart data.

Fig. 6. Blynk Platform Components.

 Blynk App allows creating interfaces for different
projects using various provided widgets.
 Blynk Server: performs all communications
between the hardware and smartphone. Blynk Cloud
can be used to run a private Blynk server locally. It’s
open-source, it can handle thousands of devices and
can even be launched on a Raspberry Pi.
 Blynk Libraries: enable communication with the
Fig. 8. ECG Output Signal on Blynk Application.
server and process all the incoming and outcoming
commands for all the popular hardware platforms.
If we compare the x-axis time with the mobile time then
we can conclude that the proposed system success to
IV. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION transfer the heart status information from the remote patient
In this section, the components of the proposed system to the physician in real-time mode.
are connected. The implementation begins with initializing Many systems have been proposed to design a
Blynk application, the first step is to download it from the healthcare system for monitoring remote patient’s status
apple store or google play store and install it on the using different techniques in data acquisition, data
smartphone, the next step is to create an account using a processing, data sending, and data displaying. In [14], [16]
valid e-mail address to receive an authentication code data and [17], the ECG data are read using various ECG sensor
field where the data can be displayed in the form of a graph models such as AD8232 and T7016 sensors, while [9] and

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[14] focused on heartbeat reading from remote patients. monitor the patient’s status data locally. Our proposed
Most of the systems have used Arduino Uno and Raspberry system achieves a significant task by monitoring the remote
Pi microcontroller because of its effectiveness and cost- patient’s data using IoT Blynk application. However, Table
effective. With the use of the internet as a transmission I illustrates the main differences between the proposed
media, most of the systems achieve unlimited distance system and other related systems.
monitoring except [13] and [15] that used Bluetooth to

TABLE I. COMPARING THE PROPOSED SYSTEM WITH OTHER RELATED SYSTEMS.

Proposed A. Kubal and C. K. A. Ahamed et al. S.LAVANYA et al. P.Kalaivan et. al. Z. U. Abideen and M. A.
Parameter
System [9] [14] [15] [16] Shah. [17]

Heartbeat pulse, The pulse oximeter, blood

AD8232
blood pressure and Bioprotech ECG oxygen saturation, ECG,
Data Reading ECG Heart Beats sensor AD8232 ECG sensor
heart sound sensors T7016 glucose sensors connected
sensor
kits to a gateway router
Micro- Arduino
Raspberry Pi Arduino Uno Raspberry Pi Arduino Uno 6LoWPAN
controller Uno
Transmission
Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Bluetooth GSM+Wi-Fi Bluetooth 3G and 4G
Technique
Distance Unlimited Unlimited 10 meters Unlimited 10 meters Unlimited
Blynk
Processing SMS
Displaying Application Web Page IP Serial plotter and Reporting emergency case
application and Acknowledgment
Results on address smartphone as an email
smartphone and Web page IP
smartphone
IoT Yes Yes No Yes No Yes

Time Real-time Real-time Real-time Real-Time Real-time Real-time

Cost-
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Effective

VI. CONCLUSION [4] E. K. Zaghouani, A. Benzina, and R. Attia, "ECG based

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