Design of an Open Remote Electrocardiogram (ECG) Service

Currently, the deployment of services for real-time delivery of an electrocardiogram to a remote site has a cost that prevents its widespread diffusion, which would contribute to saving lives with prevention, assistance and rescue efficiency. To fill this gap, we introduce the design of a remote electrocardiogram service that privileges open, low-cost options. The architecture is based on the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and uses commercial off-the-shelf devices to implement the sensor on the patient’s side. The doctor uses a laptop browser to display the tracing, and a cloud computing instance connects the two using WebSockets. A prototype is built to evaluate overall performance, the power consumption of the patient’s side device, and the quality of rendering on doctor’s browser. The patient’s sensor prototype device is portable, and its power consumption is below 1 Watt, thus allowing a daylong autonomy when operated on batteries. Its cost is below 50$, and the required hardware is commercially available. The whole design is ready for on-field evaluation, and it is available in a public repository