Design of a web-based remote heart-monitoring system

Rising costs and cutbacks to healthcare systems are making it less feasible to transport cardiac specialists and equipment from metropolitan cities to remote communities to perform electrocardiogram (ECG) heart examinations. Although telemedicine networking allows specialists to perform remote ECG examinations over dedicated T1 network connections, it is a capital-intensive solution. This paper proposes a much more cost-effective system whereby ECG signals are transmitted over the Internet. A prototype system was designed and assembled, consisting of a portable instrumentation amplifier/filter unit, two personal computers equipped with network and analog to digital cards, and TCP/IP client-server data acquisition (DAQ) software written in LabVIEW. Although Internet-based remote ECG monitoring systems have been attempted in the past, satellite links imposed unpractical limitations on the system. However, by reducing the ECG data transmission rate and packet size to allow for faster satellite transmission times, it is demonstrated that a web-based remote ECG monitoring system is a practical alternative to the current methods used in specialized cardiac regional healthcare.