An intelligent telecardiology system for offline wireless transmission and remote analysis of ECG

Abstract

This paper illustrates a wireless system developed for offline ECG transmission and its remote processing. At the transmit end, a standalone embedded system collects short duration ECG samples from the source, stores them in a RAM and then encodes these using a customized bi-phase modulation for offline transmission in ISM band. At the receive end, another embedded system extracts ECG data from the demodulated output of the wireless receiver and delivers to a desktop computer using the serial port. An application software stores these samples in a text file. At first, the bit error and packet error are computed from the received dataset. Then, computed ECG wave durations and intervals along with lead data plot are generated on a Graphical User Interface for preliminary level diagnosis. Test results with synthetic ECG from PTB diagnostic ECG database (ptb-db) for short range of communication are reported.

Keywords::

• ECG
• Telecardiology
• Bi-phase modulation
• ISM band communication
• Feature extraction

Acknowledgement

The authors express their sincere thanks to the Technical Education Quality improvement Program (TEQIP), Calcutta University for supporting with equipments like Arbitrary function Generator (Model Agilent 33220A), Mixed signal oscilloscope (Model MSO 6054A), and software like Intuilink waveform editor, Open Choice Desktop etc. The authors are also thankful to UGC SAP DRS-I project from Govt. of India for the technical assistance.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.