Development of a home ECG and blood pressure telemonitoring center

In order to improve the life quality for the cardiac patients and/or hypertensives and as well as reduce the expenses, a home electrocardiograph (ECG) and blood pressure (BP) telemonitoring network has been developed, which consists of home ECG and BP monitoring devices limited to a centralized monitoring server at the hospital. The telemonitoring center of the system is proposed in this paper. It is a surveillance of the home users by receiving the patients´ medical data and displaying them in front of the medical staff and as well as an assistant for the medical information management. The software system of the telemonitoring center, which is based on the UNIX operation system, consists of a real-time monitoring system (RTMS) and a medical information management system (MIMS) to meet the requirements of medical service for the home users. A client-server architecture is used in the TRMS in order to exchange different medical data (ECG and blood pressure) with the different home devices via PSTN. The MIMS comprises several tools, including a file manager, an ECG analyzer, a BP analyzer, and a medical data backup tool, to assist diagnosis. The trial applications of the ECG and BP telemonitoring system in the Macao and Tsinghua community demonstrate the feasibility of the telemonitoring center