MOLEC: anywhere and at any time arrhythmia classification

The new advances in sensor technology, PDAs and wireless communications favor the development of a new type of monitoring systems that can provide patients with assistance anywhere and at any time. Of particular interest are the monitoring systems designed for people that suffer from heart arrhythmias, due to the increasing number of people with cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, we present MOLEC: a PDA-based system that performs local real-time classification and detects the ECG anomalies in situ. In the actual implementation of MOLEC, the signal is acquired by some ECG sensors (ActiveECG sensors) with a 360 Hz frequency. For the preprocessing of the signal the ECGPUWAVE tool and an automata developed by us that identifies the beats are used. We have also developed a beat and rhythm classifiers that determine if there has been an anomalous rhythm, and in that case, an alarm is sent to a hospital via wireless communications. The rhythm detection delay of the MOLEC system is of 6.66 seconds