ECG Telemonitoring System Based On Real-Time Transport Protocol

Heart disease is a frequently-occurring and common disease which is harmful to human health and also one of the leading causes of death. So the diagnosis and prevention of heart disease become very important. The electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system can detect the abnormal ECG signal and has important role in clinical diagnosis. By now the clinical ECG monitoring technology become more mature and the ECG telemonitoring technology begin to develop more quickly with the development of communication, electric and information technology. Simultaneously, due to the improvement of medical service level, a new medical mode appeared which emphasis that, except the central large hospital, the community hospital and home should work together with central hospital to prevent, diagnose and cure all kinds of diseases such as heart disease. So this paper presented a ECG telemonitoring system based on real-time protocol (RTP), which is applicable in community hospital or home. This system enable the patients with heavy heart disease or elder transmit their ECG signal from community hospital or home to the remote large central hospital and get diagnosis and instruction from doctors. This system can both lighten the burden of patients and large central hospitals. This system uses client/server(C/S) mode and realize the functions such as the collection and transmission of ECG data of patients, the capture of video and audio signals of patients and doctors, the compression of video and audio signals, the package and transmission of video and audio information stream, the display of ECG data, video and audio signals. In order to reduce the requirement of network environment and improve the generality and the efficiency of data transmission as well, this system uses MPEG-4 compression technology to compress the audio and video data before they are transmitted and RTP protocol was used to package the data stream. To ensure the transmission accuracy of ECG data, the TCP protocol was used to transmit the ECG data. The results of last simulate experiment and test experiment verified that the system can accurately transmit the ECG data and the delay time and packet loss rate of audio and video data are acceptable.