Design a Customizable Low-Cost, Matlab Based Wireless Data Acquisition System for Real-Time Physiological Signal Processing

This paper presents the design of a wireless data acquisition system to acquire and process physiological signals in real-time using Matlab. The system comprises two frameworks: hardware and software. The hardware consists of a wifi connection and four slots to plug in the sensors. The signal on each slot can be sampled at the user determined rate up to 4 K samples-per-second for a 16-bit resolution of maximum analog voltage of 2.5 V. The software is based on Matlab and includes four processing streams for each slot’s data and a graphic user interface comprising four data graphs and other settings. Each stream can be processed independently by user-defined algorithms for specific data in real-time. The system also saves all the data into a text file which can be stored, retrieved, viewed, and processed by other software. For testing purpose, three analog front-ends (ECG, EMG, and SPO2) were designed and connected to the system. All the system functions were tested and performed as expected. This low cost, flexible, and easy to use data acquisition system is very useful for biomedical data collection in ambulatory environment and real-time processing the signals in practical settings.