Ubiquitous monitoring system for critical cardiac abnormalities

In many critical cardiac abnormalities, it is desirable to have a monitoring system that can keep a constant surveillance on the conditions of the heart and its related patterns. This can be very convenient in clinical settings but may not be a possibility for individuals who are not in the hospital and are in their day-to-day activities. Wearable ECG-based systems have been proposed for such situations and can perform such monitoring in real life. However, detecting the abnormality in near-real-time is still a challenge in these systems. Similarly, what information should be relayed to the doctors or other care-givers and how soon this can be achieved is a very hot area of research at present. This paper presents a monitoring system that embeds an intelligent wearable data acquisition system with unique identification algorithms requiring very little computational time and simple threshold based classification. Once this is done, the related information is passed to a gateway system that can communicate the criticality flags as well as the actual ECG waveform data to the pre-defined data node that connects it to the doctor and/or other clinical representatives. We have used Android based cellphone for as the gateway. The morphological features of mobile devices and their use in our daily lives create an opportunity to connect medical informatics systems with the main stream. The presented system focuses on intelligent health monitoring with possible wearable application for long-term monitoring and updating in real-time about the patient's ECG conditions to the physician. © 2012 Springer-Verlag