Ballistocardiography (BCG) is the measurement of heart and cardiovascular related acceleration of the body. Due to the availability of inexpensive and small accelerometers, scientific interest in BCG increased in recent years. A variety of different measurement systems have emerged. Many of them lack on data quality, such as resolution and temporal precision. A deterministic timing behaviour is essential to produce meaningful results, especially when dealing with data from multiple sensors at once. We present a novel measurement system, which allows for parallel digital data acquisition in the presence of strict deterministic timing constraints. A dedicated server manages multiple measurement boards and acts as a data sink. All connected boards are synchronized, which renders all acquired data comparable in time. On each board, data from 4 parallel channels is pre-processed and time-stamped in Field Programmable Gate Array logic. The presented system enables distributed measurements and is scalable within the limitations of the available network. A field test with over 30 subjects proved the usability and reliability of the system, while all data are made available for the community and first results of this campaign are presented within this paper.
