Real-time system for monitoring and analyzing electrocardiogram on cell phone

Abstract

A novel framework on cell phone for recollecting, processing and interpretation of patient's electrocardiograms ECG as part of development of health care and assisted living environments is presented in this paper. The proposed architecture and algorithm provide continuous detection of the QRS complex during real time ECG monitoring and interaction between doctor and patient expanding coverage of medical services. The developed procedure for heart activity monitoring uses a set of filters for image noise reduction and computes ECG signal gradient for identification of the components with the greatest slope. To highlight the steepest parts of ECG, the absolute value of gradient is averaged over a moving window of 80 ms considered as the minimum duration of QRS complex. In the decision phase, a peak detector is applied. The height of detected peaks is compared to the threshold determined as the signal-to-noise ratio for final definition of heart rate. The designed prototype has been tested using standard MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database and evaluated confirming that system has good compromise between high transmission and processing speed and satisfactory accuracy, which does not fall below the precision of commercial equipment for heart monitoring. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.