Wireless personal health ECG monitoring application

Abstract

It is vital for a chronic medical patient to continuously take readings of his/her vital functions (e.g. heartbeat, etc.) and present to the physician. The problems are how to take readings without affecting the patient's normal life and how to send large amounts of data associated with vital readings like ECG, EEG, etc. to the physician effectively. In this article we propose a framework which will collect readings from ECG monitoring devices in a wireless network, then compress the collected data and automatically send this data to the physician through the patient's handheld device like 'smart' phone. We have also proposed an efficient compression algorithm for compressing the ECG waveforms in real time into a form that can be easily transmitted from the handheld device using SMS. The results obtained after implementing this compression algorithm using Java platform, micro edition version 2 (J2ME) are compared with existing ECG compression algorithms in terms of percent mean square difference (PRD), compression ratio (CR) and execution time.