Bidirectional ECG Monitoring with an Event Detection Policy Engine

As the population ages and the risk of chronic disease increases, the cost of healthcare will rise. Technology for mobile telemetry could reduce cost and improve the efficiency of treatment. In order to achieve these goals, we first need to overcome several technical challenges. We present a Mobile Biotelemetric System (MBS) that addresses these remote medical monitoring challenges. MBS comprises a custom low-power sensor node that accurately collects and analyzes electrocardiogram (ECG) data, a client service with a multifaceted policy engine that evaluates the data, and a web portal interface for visualizing ECG data streams. MBS differs from other remote monitoring systems primarily in the policy engine´s ability to provide flexible, robust, and precise system communication end-to-end and to enable tradeoffs in metrics such as power and transmission frequency. We show that, given a representative set of ECG signals, policies can be set to make the operation of the hardware and software resilient against transient ECG conditions for both security and monitoring purposes. We demonstrate that our system adaptively trades off system-level metrics based on a combination of operating conditions and user input, and that our heartbeat detection algorithm performs well for challenging ECG input.