FPGA based reconfigurable body area network using Nios II and uClinux
Date
2013-05-03
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
Type
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
This research is focused on identifying an appropriate design for a reconfigurable
Body Area Network (BAN).
In order to investigate the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed design, a BAN
system prototype was built. This system consists of two distinct node types: a slave
node and a master node. These nodes communicate using ZigBee radio transceivers.
The microcontroller-based slave node acquires sensor data and transmits digitized
samples to the master node. The master node is FPGA-based and runs uClinux on
a soft-core microcontroller. The purpose of the master node is to receive, process
and store digitized sensor data. In order to verify the operation of the BAN system
prototype and demonstrate reconfigurability, a specific application was required.
Pattern recognition in electrocardiogram (ECG) data was the application used in
this work and the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database was used as the known data source
for verification. A custom test platform was designed and built for the purpose of
injecting data from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database into the BAN system.
The BAN system designed and built in this work demonstrates the ability to record
raw ECG data, detect R-peaks, calculate and record R-R intervals, detect premature
ventricular and atrial contractions. As this thesis will identify, many aspects of this
BAN system were designed to be highly reconfigurable allowing it to be used for a
wide range of BAN applications, in addition to pattern recognition of ECG data.
Description
Keywords
Body Area Network, Reconfigurable, FPGA, Nios, uClinux
Citation
Degree
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Program
Electrical Engineering