A remote doctor for homecare and medical diagnoses on cardiac patients by an adaptive ECG analysis

Today the telemedicine applications are experiencing rapid growth. The possibility of having portable devices to use comfortably at home for monitoring the health of the patient has involved many research areas. In this paper a remote doctor for homecare and medical diagnoses on cardiac patient is proposed. An original smart system has been projected in order to adapt itself to the patient and develop, in this way, a personalized diagnosis taking into account his personal data and his clinical history; a practical and economical device that can adapt to any type of patient. The system is based on a PDA and an ECG sensor which acquires, at a fixed sampling frequency, the heart electrical impulses. In details, a removable and updatable memory is used to store the clinical and personal patient data, while an additional internal and read-only memory stores information on the metrological status of the measurement system. On PDA display, it is possible to observe the ECG signal graph, the information relating to diagnosis and the measurement uncertainty. The patient also has the opportunity to print the results by a Bluetooth printer. Through build-in models the ECG waveform is analyzed in order to diagnose possible arrhythmias occurrences or the happening of a heart attack according to some parameters like age, sex and physical constitution of the patient, and information on the measurement uncertainty. The embedded information on the system metrological performances and patient data are used to configure the computing algorithm and so to reduce the happening of diagnosis faults.