EEG-over-BLE: A Novel Low-Power Architecture for Multi-Channel EEG Monitoring Systems

The availability of energy-efficient wireless protocols and architectures is a mandatory requirement for the development of wearable measurement instruments suitable for continuous monitoring of medical parameters. In this context, we propose EEG-over-BLE, a novel architecture for multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring systems. Basically, the proposed architecture combines Bluetooth technology with a near-lossless EEG compression algorithm and a simple channel encoding scheme in order to largely reduce power consumption. Here we present the results of a detailed simulation campaign aimed at assessing the performance of the proposed architecture in terms of energy consumption, packet loss rate and end-to-end latency. According to simulation results, when EEG-over-BLE sensor nodes are powered with commercial small form factor batteries, their lifetime is over 66 days. At the same time, a packet loss rate lower than 0.1% and a latency below 40 ms are achieved.