A wireless ECG acquisition device for remote monitoring of heart rate and arrhythmia detection

Today, health information technology is the area of IT involving the design and development of telemedicine solutions, providing to patients medical services that enhance their quality of life. Technological advances in integrated circuits and wireless communications have led to the design and fabrication of low-cost, low-power, miniature, and intelligent physiological data acquisition devices. The paper describes the design and implementation of a portable device used to acquire and wirelessly transmit the electrocardiographic signal (ECG), collected from a patient, to a Personal Computer (PC). The developed device is based on the multichannel high-resolution medical analog front-end ADS1298, connected to a wireless development tool eZ430-RF2500, both from Texas Instruments. On the PC is running an application that receives the ECG data from wireless device, process the signal in order to compute the heart rate, and run a simple arrhythmia detector. A prototype of the wireless device has already been designed, implemented, and partially tested.