Wireless personal health ECG monitoring application

It is vital for a chronic medical patient to continuously take readings of his/her vital functions (e.g. heartbeat, etc.) and present to the physician. The problems are how to take readings without affecting the patient´s normal life and how to send large amounts of data associated with vital readings like ECG, EEG, etc. to the physician effectively. In this article we propose a framework which will collect readings from ECG monitoring devices in a wireless network, then compress the collected data and automatically send this data to the physician through the patient´s handheld device like ´smart´ phone. We have also proposed an efficient compression algorithm for compressing the ECG waveforms in real time into a form that can be easily transmitted from the handheld device using SMS. The results obtained after implementing this compression algorithm using Java platform, micro edition version 2 (J2ME) are compared with existing ECG compression algorithms in terms of percent mean square difference (PRD), compression ratio (CR) and execution time.