An m-health system for continuous monitoring of children with suspected cardiac arrhythmias

Abstract

In this study, we present a mobile health (m-Health) system that will be used for continuous monitoring of children with suspected cardiac arrhythmias. The system is able to do real-time acquisition and transmission of ECG signals, and facilitate an alarm scheme able to identify possible arrhythmias so as to notify the on-call doctor and the relatives of the child that an event or something that denotes malfunction is happening. In general the problem has been divided into two cases. The first one, called "In-house case" the subject is located in his/her house. While for the second, called "Moving patient case" the subject might be located anywhere else. Our goal is the continuous 24 hours monitoring of the child. During the "In house case", a sensor network installed in the child's house will be used in order to continuously monitor ECG signals from the patient. While other environmental parameters like light, temperature will also be monitored to check the living conditions. The ECG signal is recorded by a sensor carried from the child, which is part of a wireless sensor network. Signal information from the wearable sensor is propagated to a local monitoring station which will also act as a gateway to the rest of the monitoring network. The second case is more general. For this case, the child will be monitored using the same ECG recording device but the signals will be transmitted, through a PDA device, directly to the central monitoring system. The transmission is performed through the use of 2.5G and 3G mobile communication networks. The system design and development is currently passing through the initial technical testing phase, while we intent to test it on healthy volunteers so as to verify the usage before moving to the initial pilot tests. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.