Development of a Visible Light Communication System for Electrocardiogram Signal Transfer in Biomedical Applications

Abstract

The visible light communication (VLC) system is expected to share the load on internet and communication technology (ICT) and be a promising green mode of communication, especially in healthcare applications. In this chapter, a frequency shift keying (FSK)-based VLC system is proposed that caters to the need of biomedical signal transfer. The system is implemented in hardware and is found to be flicker free to bit rates as low as 34bps and shows 82.33% improvement in BER compared to OOK. Using this method, different types of ECG signal are transferred successfully through a 1 W LED through a distance of 3m. The received signal retains the characteristics in terms of the RR interval and beats per minute (BPM) and the correlation between the transmitted and the received is very high (~100%), which is highly desired in transfer of biomedical signals. Future implementations and scope are also discussed in the chapter.