A pacemaker working status telemonitoring algorithm

To extend the application of a previously developed home ECG and blood pressure telemonitoring system for pacemaker users, a specially designed pacemaker working status analysis algorithm is developed in this paper. First, a pacing beat and spontaneous beat recognition algorithm are established in which a FIR filter and three threshold methods are used to pick up the pacing spikes, and a dynamic threshold modification method is proposed for error elimination. Second, a beat classification algorithm is developed based on decision rules for six commonly used pacemaker types. Third, a pacemaker malfunction recognition algorithm is established to evaluate the pacemaker working status. Fourth, the statistics of the analysis and the report are also provided. To validate the algorithm, clinical data were collected and manually classified by specialists. Then, the classification and recognition results were obtained with the clinical data. The results show that the algorithm can achieve a recognition rate of 98.4%. The results also indicate that the algorithm is capable of working at real-time speed. The algorithm has been incorporated into the telemonitoring system, and trial application cases are also reported.