A wireless system for monitoring of children with suspected cardiac arrhythmias

Abstract

Arrhythmia is one of the most difficult problems in Cardiology and especially in Pediatric Cardiology. 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 as well as environmental parameters. 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, development and technical tests (using simulator) are finished. The next step will be the better verification of the system on healthy volunteers so as to get ready for application on patients. Copyright 2009 ACM.