Reducing Power Consumption of Wireless Pulse Oximeters

Purpose - To implement the signal processing algorithms into a data evaluation unit powered by mains electricity whilst the measuring head is powered by battery is a commonly used method of power management in measurement technology. As the measuring head no longer needs to deal with data evaluation, a processing unit with lower performance parameters is sufficient, thus reducing overall energy consumption. Although adopting this principle could save energy, it is still not used in today's wireless pulse oximeters. Design/methodology/approach - Based on theoretical calculations, the efficacy of applying this principle when using wireless pulse oximeters was demonstrated within this paper. The power consumption of two theoretical pulse oximeter models was compared, side by side. One of them evaluated the measured data in the measuring head. The other one transmitted the pure digitalized signal, and did not have any data processing task in the measuring head. Findings - From the results of the study the following conclusion could be drawn: an energy saving of 41% can be reached when using the wireless pulse oximeters with omitting the data processing from the measuring head. The model parameters were verified by examining the power consumption of an in-house made pulse oximeter. Originality/Value - Although this principle has not been used for pulse oximeters until this point, this paper proved the efficacy of the power reduction of the measuring head by omitting the data processing. This method can be adopted by manufacturers in the future.