Design And Implementation Of Remote Wireless ECG Monitoring System

With the improvement of information technology and living standards, tele-medicine and family health care have emerged and traditional hospital-based medical model is transforming to the family and community-centered model of health care. In this case, low-cost portable and intelligent personal and family health monitoring device has a broad market demand. ECG (electrocardiogram) is the main foundation in angiocardiopathy dignosis. This paper implements a portable ECG monitor with real-time auto-diagonisis and wireless data transmission, based on which a four level network-based medical assistance system combined with individual, family, community and hospital is discussed. Our work contains the following aspects.1. The hardware and software architure design. The heart is S3C2440 micro processor and Linux operating system. We have designed the ECG acquiring board; build embedded bootloader, operating system and Nand flash file system. This sets up environment for top layer application development.2. Design of the Client Software, including CDMA wireless Module driver and PPP dialing script, AD convertor driver, data transmission based on Socket, the display of realtime waveform and dynamic parametor on LCD, short message alarm. The difficult is software architecture, which must ensure the cooperation of all the above function modules.3. Realtime ECG processing algorithm that accomplish detection and diagonisis. Detection means data analysis and extracting parameters, which include instantaneous heart rate, average heart rate, R-wave location, R-wave amplitude, RR intervals and QRS width. Diagonisis means the recognization and classication of unusual signal, which can provide the name of disease for reference purpose.4. The monitoring center server software. The C program runs as daemon process on Linux host. It is responsible for user authentication, reveiving data, update MySQL database, auto-detection and diagosis. Multi-Process technology is used to server concurrent connections. Application layer protocol also designed.5. The ECG databse management system based on LAMP architecture, wihcih is an important component of the networked medical assistant system. Storage format of ECG data, MySQL data table and table relations, web pages with different user privilege for quere and mangemet were designed. The waveform was plotted using interactive Flash and the location was marked using Google Map and GPS information.To sum up, the ECG monitor can collect data and do auto diagnosis without restricting freedom of the user, the results and suggestions are shown on the screen. The monitor communicates with central server through CDMA wireless network, and the automatic alarm and GPS location ensures the patient get assistance at the first time. Users or their relatives can look up their ECG information using web browser and communicate with doctors online.