Monitoring Software for a Wireless Vest, Built Before the Vest Was Done

The problem

A medical device startup was developing a wearable vest that measures ECG and respiration and sends the readings wirelessly to a PC. The vest was still being built, but they couldn’t afford to wait for it before starting on the software that would receive, display, and record its data.

They also knew the design would keep changing, so the code had to be easy for their own team to read and extend.

What we built

The PC data system. It connects to each vest over Bluetooth, unpacks the data stream, and shows ECG and respiration live while recording everything to disk. Operators can test the link to each vest individually before a session, start and stop recording, and reload a past session to review it. It handles several vests in one session.

A stand-in for the vest. We built a functional emulation of the vest that generates realistic ECG and respiration signals and sends them over the same Bluetooth module and packet format the real vest would use. The PC software could be developed and tested end to end long before the hardware existed.

Bluetooth on both ends. We integrated the radio module into both the emulator and the receiver and configured the pair to behave like the real system.

Everything was delivered as documented, modular source code and a built application, with error handling throughout and a description on every control.

The result

Software and hardware moved forward in parallel instead of one waiting on the other. When real vests arrived, they connected to software that had already been exercised against the same data format.