Practical laboratory project in telemedicine: Supervision of electrocardiograms by mobile telephony

This paper describes a project carried out in the laboratory of Principles of Bioengineering within the Telecommunications Engineering degree (five academic years plus a final thesis). The main object of this project is to set up a portable system for the acquisition, analysis, and transmission by mobile telephony of the electrocardiogram (ECG) of an indeterminate number of patients. The network of patients is managed from a control center (CC), comprising a personal computer (PC) with application software and a mobile telephony communications system. In a real system, each patient would have a patient terminal with a microprocessor-based, ECG-acquisition system with processing and transmission by mobile telephony. Time and technical considerations mean that, in the project, the patient terminal will have to be implemented in a PC. To perform this project, the students must have a wide range of knowledge acquired in this course and in other subjects required for this degree: design of bioamplifiers, information-processing algorithms, mobile-telephony communications, user-interface programming, etc. Having to use these concepts will no doubt serve as a stimulus to the students carrying out the work.