An Intelligent Telecardiology System Using a Wearable and Wireless ECG to Detect Atrial Fibrillation

Abstract

This study presents a novel wireless, ambulatory, real-time, and autoalarm intelligent telecardiology system to improve healthcare for cardiovascular disease, which is one of the most prevalent and costly health problems in the world. This system consists of a lightweight and power-saving wireless ECG device equipped with a built-in automatic warning expert system. This device is connected to a mobile and ubiquitous real-time display platform. The acquired ECG signals are instantaneously transmitted to mobile devices, such as netbooks or mobile phones through Bluetooth, and then, processed by the expert system. An alert signal is sent to the remote database server, which can be accessed by an Internet browser, once an abnormal ECG is detected. The current version of the expert system can identify five types of abnormal cardiac rhythms in real-time, including sinus tachycardia, sinus bradycardia, wide QRS complex, atrial fibrillation (AF), and cardiac asystole, which is very important for both the subjects who are being monitored and the healthcare personnel tracking cardiac-rhythm disorders. The proposed system also activates an emergency medical alarm system when problems occur. Clinical testing reveals that the proposed system is approximately 94% accurate, with high sensitivity, specificity, and positive prediction rates for ten normal subjects and 20 AF patients. We believe that in the future a business-card-like ECG device, accompanied with a mobile phone, can make universal cardiac protection service possible.

Flexible Graphene Electrodes for Prolonged Dynamic ECG Monitoring

“…In particular, as the elderly population gradually increases in more and more countries, home health care management for these elderly people has attracted increasing attention. With the continuing advances in device miniaturization and wireless technologies, wearable on-body ECG devices for long-term use that have been devised to capture and monitor the electrical activity of the heart may help to establish diagnoses in patients, and considerable progress has been made in this field [4,5,6,7]. However, despite advancements in wireless technology and electronics miniaturization, the development of daily ECG monitoring equipment is still limited by the inconvenience of and patient discomfort caused by wet adhesive electrodes [8], which has led to new requirements for high-performance ECG electrodes with biological compatibility.…”

Development of Novel Non-Contact Electrodes for Mobile Electrocardiogram Monitoring System

“…Fig. 9 shows four randomly selected results of ECG measurement and heart rate detected by the QRS detection algorithm [16] . Although the sway and rub of the non-contact electrodes under motion and action resulted in noise, the features of ECG waveform can still be well recognized.…”

Wireless transmission of biosignals for hyperbaric chamber applications

“…Bluetooth based solutions [10] [11] are mainly used for home automation networks in which long-term monitoring is needed. Finally, the system proposed in [12] is a ZigBee (IEEE802.15.4) based communication platform working on ad-hoc hardware.…”