Proceeding of the 2015 IEEE

International Conference on Information and Automation

Lijiang, China, August 2015

Android Bluetooth Multi-Source Signal Acquisition

For Multi-Parameter Health Monitoring Devices
Xiaojing Tang1 , Chao Hu2 , WeiXing Lin2
1. Ningbo University, NingboChina315211
2. Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, Ningbo, China, 315100
{tangxiaojing27@163.com, chao.hu@siat.ac.cn, linweixing@nbu.edu.cn
Abstract - In this paper, a portable physical health monitoring
system is proposed based on the Android smart phone system.
This system can be applied to monitor human multi physiological
and biochemical parameters in real time, including the ECG,
blood pressure, body temperature, heart rate, SPO2, blood sugar,
and etc. The Android smart phone receives the parameters via
Bluetooth communication from each health sensor module, and
display the monitoring data simultaneously. It also delivers the
related data to web server, which makes the health diagnosis and
analysis on these data and feedbacks important information to
the users. In order to solve the problem of the common Bluetooth
module only providing the one to one communication, the
multi-thread and the link reuse techniques are applied to realize
the wireless data transmission from multi-sources to the smart
phone. The experimental results show that this network works
effectively, and the smart phone can interact with up to 7
Bluetooth sensor modules simultaneously.
Keywords: Android; Bluetooth; Multi-Source Signals;
Health-Monitoring
I. INTRODUCTION
Human health is an eternal important topic. While the
health monitoring hardware and systems are being
continuously improved, the home medical examination
instruments and telemedicine techniques have been caught the
sight of the medical workers, the researchers and the
customers. Recently, there are increasing novel ideas and
inventions for the new portable medical devices in hospitals,
communities, and even in common families. These new
devices have been integrated with the high capacity embedded
microcomputer (or microprocessor), the wireless network, and
the intelligent algorithms, so that their function and the quality
are significantly improved. One example is presented by Shi
Xiong et al[1]; they put forward a physiological parameter
monitoring system based on the smart phone with the Android
operating system and realizes the transmission of
physiological data from the detecting module to smart phone.
For the interaction between acquisition module and smart
phone, LiGuo Li et al [2] developed a health service terminal
on the basis of analyzing the Bluetooth and the Android
operating system. They focused their research on the operating
system to support the Bluetooth communication. On the other
hand, Bo Gao et al[3] proposed a Bluetooth low power
consumption personal health network. The algorithm is able to
adaptively control transmitting power based on RSSI and
reduce power consumption at most 25%. Heng Ma et al[4] built
a system for a health monitoring body sensor network (BSN)
based on ZigBee and Bluetooth, which controls the sensor
nodes to acquire the human blood oxygen, heart sounds, blood
pressure and other vital signs parameters in real-time. The
acquired messages (vital signs) are transmitted to the 3G smart
phone and the intelligent terminal.
Recently, we have also done some work to monitor
health data in more convenient way[5]. We tried to build a
portable instrument to include as many the normal parameters
as possible, such as the physiological parameters: blood
pressure, SO2, heart rate, body temperature, ECG, breathe
rate, and the biochemical parameters such as blood sugar.
Nevertheless, we wish to use the smart phone to collect all
messages from different instruments. It results in the problem
of multi-source signal acquisition, and each source has
multi parameters for the health monitoring. Besides, it is also a
challenge to analyze the multi-source data and send them to
the web server.
We solve the problem that common Bluetooth module
has mutual exclusion and can only provides the one to one
communication. The proposed method is to use the
multi-thread technique to realize the data transmission and
synchronization from the multi-source sensors to the android
smart phone.
In this paper, the framework of health monitoring system
is discussed in section II; including the acquisition module, the
Android program and the web service server. The multi
Bluetooth connection algorithms and the Android/server
programs are described in section . In section IV, we
present the experiments for testing the connections of the
health monitoring modules to the smart phone; and the speed
rate of the data transmission. Finally, the conclusion is given
in section V.
II. FRAMEWORK OF HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEM
The health monitoring system includes three parts, the
acquisition module, the Android program and the web server,
as is shown in Fig.1.
Fig.1 System framework

978-1-4673-9104-7/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE 1790

 Acquisition module contains some physiological and
biochemical acquisition devices of conventional parameters,
such as blood oxygen, blood sugar, heart rate and body
temperature and etc. All the acquisition modules have their
own independent MCU unit and use the Bluetooth chip to
send results wirelessly. We choose the latest Bluetooth 4.0 as
the version of the Bluetooth module, for the reason that it not
only is compatible with 2.0 and 3.0 module, but also has the
characteristics of low power consumption and relative high
speed rate.
The architecture of the Android system is similar to other
operating system and a layered architecture, from upper to
lower the application layer is application framework runtime
layer, system layer and the Linux kernel layer. Our android
program is coded by the Java language and has different
function partitioned modules. The main part is the data
processing module and data display module. The Bluetooth
monitoring program is on the application layer, but the
Bluetooth driver is provided by the kernel layer. The
monitoring program is divided into three main parts. The first
is connection processing module for the connection request
and data transfer; the second is the management module
responsible for mapping interface and data display; the third
part is the interaction module responsible for the interaction
with the cloud server.
The web server has few function partitions, including the
data processing module and the user interaction module. The
data processing module stores the monitoring data from the
Android phone. It can send health or medical warning
messages to users when receiving abnormal health monitoring
data. The user interaction module is a interface which provides
APIs to the web service to query health monitoring data.
. MULTI BLUETOOTH CONNECTIONS TECHNOLOGY AND
SOFTWARE DESIGN
The focus of this article is on the topic how to establish
multiple connections between multi health monitoring
modules and a server phone, to monitor Multi-Source signals.
A. The Bluetooth Module Connection With MCU
The method of sending data is turn the serial port to
Bluetooth. The chips UART serial port TX pin is connected
to the Bluetooth module RD pin, UART serial port RD pin is
connected to Bluetooth module TX pin, and then each others
VCC3 and GND pin was connected, as is shown in Fig.2.
After this, we can send data that in the register of the chip to
the paired and connected device in the way of turning serial
port to Bluetooth.
If paired and connected, the Bluetooth module can work
in full-duplex mode, support 8 bits of data transfer, one stop
bit; it supports the standard baud rate from 4800bps to
115200bps; here 9600bps is chosen. The 3, 4 pin are set high
to enter the AT command mode to set the corresponding
parameters.
For the android mobile phone, the system has already
made a good encapsulation to the Bluetooth application
package. We set the mobile Bluetooth in master mode and the
monitoring module in slave mode. When the acquisition
equipment is opened and completes the pairing with mobile
phone, it can send data to the phone without pairing again in
the later data transfer process.
B. The Data Transfer Protocol
Health monitoring of physiological and biochemical
parameters have two types. One is the instantaneous value,
such as temperature, blood sugar, height, weight and etc. The
other is the long-data and real-time monitoring parameters,
such as Electrocardiograph (ECG) and Photoplethysmogram
(PPG). So we designed two types of transmission protocols
and send the collected data in different formats.
For small amount of the instantaneous parameters data,
the validity and accuracy of the data must be verified; so we
add several bits for identifications to the normal data and set a
data validation byte by weighted check. For example, the
blood glucose data are transferred in bytes with total length of
eight bytes. The first and the second bytes are flags bytes
which are defined as hex 0x52 and 0x42; the middle section of
three bytes are random bytes; and 7,8 bytes are the data of
blood sugar, as shown in Table 1. For example, a receiving
frame is (0x52 x42 0xff 0x10 x65 0x00 x00 x32); we can
determine the blood sugar value is 0x32 (for Blood glucose
5.2).
Table. 1 Blood glucose data format
Byte0~3 Byte4 Byte5 Byte6
define Random Temperature Temperature Fixed 0xff
High 8 bit Low 8 bit
Table. 2 Ear temperature data format
Byte0 Byte2 Byte3~5 Byte6 Byte7
define Flag1 Flag2 Random Low 8 bit High 8 bit
value 0x52 0x42
For real-time monitoring, the data should be sent to the
mobile terminal in time to avoid the data lagging. For this type
of data transmission, if a large number of auxiliary data and
flags are added to normal data, it will leads wasting of
bandwidth and data lag inevitably, so we check the first
several data in the head of the data packet. It starts with 4
bytes of flag data and no other redundant data, the format is
shown as the following Table. 3.

Table. 3 Blood glucose data format

Byte0 Byte1 Byte2 Byte3 Byte4
define Flag1 Flag2 Flag3 Flag4 data
Fig. 2 Connection between MCU and Bluetooth chip value 0x47 0x53 0x83 0x11

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C. Android Program Design
The android program is designed by using the Android
Bluetooth API which can do operations such as search for
mobile and make connection between Bluetooth devices.
Besides, Java multi-thread and multi-channel model skills
were applied to manage each connected device socket and
realize the multiple devices data transmission and monitoring.
In the Multi-Source signal acquisitions, the acquisition module
can be arbitrary switched, turn on or turn off, as well as the
data transfer to the Android mobile terminal. The program
interface is programmed by using Android conventional
component. TextViews are used to show the blood oxygen,
blood sugar, heart rate, body temperature and other monitoring
data. The Real-time monitoring data curve is drawn by
Achartengine which is a Google open source project. The
work flow of the Android program is shown as Fig.3.
Message transmission
The web server
Fig. 3 Android program frameworks
1) The Underlying Data Interaction
The underlying data interface module is responsible for
data interaction with the acquisition equipment, establishing
connection with multi acquisition devices, receiving and
parsing the received monitoring data. Data processing and
displaying should in accordance with transmission protocol of
byte stream that we designed.
We use the Android4.2 and ADT22.6 as development
tools. In order to realize the function of Bluetooth in the
Android system, some preparation work should be done. First
of all, some permissions should be declared in the
AndroidManifest XML file. Second, a Bluetooth adapter is
obtained, and the local Bluetooth adapter can be gotten by
using getDefaultAdapter function and then get remote
Bluetooth adapter by BluetoothDevice class. After getting the
Bluetooth adapter, the Bluetooth function is opened and the
surrounding equipment is searched.
In searching for a remote Bluetooth device,
bluetoothadapter.getBluetoothDevice is used to get specified
Bluetooth address. The class is actually a Bluetooth hardware
address book, and we use BluetoothAdapter class to create a
Bluetoothdevice object, the classes we used in our program is
shown in table 4.
At the beginning of the program, the
ACTION_DISCOVERY_FINISHED and ACTION_FOUND
broadcast receivers are registered to monitor the connection
request of the client. When the connection request triggered
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the two receivers events, the program will get the address
info of the client and save it. The server phone use the client
address info to distinguish different acquisition module and
make Bluetooth socket connection, the flow is shown in Fig.4.
Fig. 4 Bluetooth work flow
2) Multiple Connections Establishment
For conventional Bluetooth communication mode(c/s),
the server of the smart phone do some essential operations and
start the accept service according to their Bluetooth device
address. A client device make a connection operation
according to the server address and create a socket by
a universally unique identifier (UUID) which must
be accordance with the server, RFCOMM protocol use UUID
to distinguish different Bluetooth devices. The steps are like
this:
(1)pairing the phone and the desired device.
(2)The master side start accept action according to the
prescribed UUID and then begin broadcasting connection
information.
(3)The slave side creates a socket according to the
prescribed UUID and the server device address, then sends the
connection request.
(4)The master side listens this request and get a socket
channel.
(5)The server and the client communicate with each other
by the established socket channel.
The above procedure is typically used for one to one
connection. For the multi source connections, we should make
some changes. For Android applications layer, the established
socket connections between Bluetooth devices will not
disconnect when there is a new connection request and starts
new thread. So, we use the multi-thread technique to establish
multiple Bluetooth socket connections and manage the data
transmission. The main process include several threads. The
first is the main thread which is responsible for drawing view;
the second is the accept thread in charge of handling the
Bluetooth connection request; the third is the communication
manage thread. All the read thread and write thread of each
socket connection is managed by the communication manage
thread. The thread framework is shown as the fig. 5.
Fig. 5 the thread framework of the program
Besides a normal connection, we add 2 new steps to
establish multi connection:
(1)At the end of a listening, that is, after the two devices
completing the Bluetooth socket establishment, the program
create a new message and send it to the main process.
(2)The process thread cancel the original accept thread
after receiving the message, and then reopen the accept
operation according to a new UUID. Then we can deal with
other Bluetooth devices connect request.
Table. 4 Bluetooth API in Android
package description
BluetoohAdapter Local blue adapter
BluetoohClassService Bluetooth service
BluetoohDevice Bluetooth device(remote)
BluetoohServiceSocket Listen class
BluetoohSocket Bluetooth connect class
According to the present standard android document for
Bluetooth communication, max seven client connections can
be realized to the server. These seven connections can be
active and send data at the same time. In addition, we can keep
248 connections in sleep mode, and the connections on sleep
or activated can be switched.
As all the manufacturers of Bluetooth module produce
the chip in a uniform standard, the chips used have the same
UUID which is defined as
UUID00001101-0000-1000-8000-00805F9B34FB. We can
not change the UUID address of the integration module, what
we can do is just modify the master-slave mode, so it causes
some trouble to connect multiple health monitoring modules
to smart phone. However, we use the RFCOMM protocol to
match and establish multi socket connections by using the way
of connecting devices one by one.
All the connections between modules and phone use the
same UUID. After a connection has been established, the
server post a notification, and cancel the origin receiving
operation and start a new accept with the same arguments. The
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method is similar with polling, but we must do some control to
remove the errors and overtime.
D. Server and Web Service Program Design
The storage of health monitoring data and early warning
function are under the platform of the mobile cloud services. It
is a kind of internet interactive access mode. The server of the
monitoring system designed has a few function partitions. To
reduce the coupling of the code, we separate the data
processing module from the user interaction module. The
servers work flow is show as Fig.6.
The basic function of the server is to handle the
monitoring data sent from the mobile client; the mobile client
automatically synchronizes the collected data to the cloud
server from various regions. While the servers data access
service must meet the total mass of users request, we
configure the thread pool model to manage the data processing
threads. The thread pool trends to adjust the number of the
available threads according to the number of the device which
request data synchronization and data storage.
client
Fig. 6 Server framework
The web service is a better way providing data access,
and users can submit the form in the relevant page to complete
the relevant informations query from the SQL database. The
database of the server provides some API to submit and query
health monitoring data form web service of the user. We
programmed a PHP web page and configure its proxy server
with Nginx, and then placed it on the public IP. The patients
and the doctor can query the whole mentoring data form the
web page without the mobile client.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS ANALYSIS
Since the main problem is to handle Multi-Source signal
acquisition, we do the experiment for the maximum
connections for the system and test the speed rate.
A. The Maximum Connection Experiment
We chose various types of Bluetooth chips and connected
them to the microcontroller and do the connection tests with
Android phone, as is show in Fig. 7.

Table 5 Maximum connection tests average value of twenty times
Total number 1 2 3 4 5 6
Success connections 1 2 3 4 5 6
Total times 1 3 4 6 9 11
Average time (s) 1 1.5 1.3 1.5 1.8 1.8
If the connected socket channel was disconnected, the
socket will return a state code, which shows whether the
connection is active. At the same time, we calculate and
record the total time of establishing connection to all the
devices, the result is show as Table 5.
From the table, we observe that Android system can
support maximum seven connections of Bluetooth devices at
the same time. When the number of connections is more than
seven, the connect operation might be fail or a connected
device will be disconnected. Seven devices were paired, and
the connections between devices and phone take about ten
seconds. In a single server and multi client mode, up to seven
activate connections are guaranteed. If more devices are
desired, we suggest the method to use a client device as a 2nd
level server, to form a sub-network and deliver the data to the
1st network server.
Fig. 7 Bluetooth connection test
B. The Speed Rate Research
On the other hand, we concern about the Bluetooth
bandwidth at the same time. We send 10M mp4 files from
multi Android client phones to a Android server phone in the
protocol that have discussed in the second part of the paper
and the client number was added one each time. We started
the experiment with two clients and added the number of the
clients to maximum seven. The speed rate value was recorded
to different text file; the results are shown as Fig.8.
Fig.8 The average transmission rate of twenty times of
device number range 4 to 7
According to the diagram, when the number of
connections rising, the overall speed rate decline and maintain
7 8 the total Bluetooth transmission bandwidth. It is owning to
7 7
that the Bluetooth RFCOMM protocol uses L2CAP protocol
to realize reuse link. Health physiological parameters are
12 13 always low frequency signal and concentrated in 1 to 10hz. If
1.7 1.8 we adopt 10KHz sampling frequency and 16-bit sampling
accuracy, the amount of data per second is 300b/s, and the
minimum transmission rate of 20kb/s in the experiment can
meet the requirement.
V. CONCLUSION
A Health monitoring network system is presented based
on Android Bluetooth communication, which realizes the
health monitoring of Multi-Source signals acquired from multi
acquisition modules. The problems of data transmission and
synchronization from the multi-source sensors to the android
smart phone have been researched and tested. The results
show that the proposed method realizes the functions of the
health monitoring system in the smart phone by overcoming
the problems of the multi-channel Bluetooth communication.
The experiment shows that the system work effectively and
can support multi acquisition devices simultaneously.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No.61273332, 61202196), Ningbo Sc. &
Tech. (Innovation Team) plan project (2014B82015).
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