A Telemedicine ECG Monitoring System

Mobile communication network technology has been paid more and more attention by system managers and developers. Based on the mobile communication network, many kinds of applications to wireless data transmission can be well developed. In the paper, a telemedicine ECG monitoring system transmitting ECG signal by GSM, GPRS communication network is studied. The system can entirely realize telemedicine dynamic ECG monitoring. With GSM, GPRS communication network, the system is economic, practical and needless of constructing devices for transmitting and receiving signal. Moreover, the system is of simple structure and use of less chips. The system consists of two parts: the portable recording devices carried by patients and the monitoring system installed in the monitoring hospital.The portable recording device is designed by using an AVR single-chip microprocessor Atmega8 and FLASH memories. The device communicates with mobile communication network through interface RS-232. By using the single-chip microprocessor, the device can record ECG precisely and transmit the recorded data to the monitoring hospital. The software in the monitoring system has been developed with VC++6. 0. It has such functions as receiving ECG, showing the ECG wave on the screen, completing ECG diagnosis and feedback the diagnosis in SMS format to patients.It is known that the long time period of recording for dynamic ECG signal is necessary. Therefore, a large amount of data should be stored, so the compression of ECG signal is very essential. There are a lot of methods on the compression of ECG signal, but in the paper, the method is based on wavelet transform and adaptive coding. It can obtain better compression rate than other methods and reflect the accurate detail of original signal.