An HTML5-based ECG viewer

Hospitals and health care systems usually need to install appropriate, ad-hoc software in every computer that requires access to an electrocardiogram (ECG). Other solutions provide the ECGs as images, hindering thereby advanced features. One step beyond is the use of applets, which provide a richer web environment, but this still requires additional software (e.g. a Java interpreter). To avoid supplementary installations while preserving advanced capabilities, emergent web standards can be used. This paper presents a web-based ECG viewer able to perform advanced actions over the waveform by using the fifth revision of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and JavaScript. Different features were designed and tested in different browsers, including desktop, tablet, smartphone, and television set devices. Some features were not fully supported by all browsers, but these deficiencies will eventually be resolved, as browsers completely adapt HTML5. As a result, a platform-independent, web-based ECG viewer in compliance with the latest web standards was designed, developed and tested in different browsers. The use of the chosen technologies facilitates the creation of complex applications displaying high-performance graphics that can be visualized anywhere with an internet connection and in different types of devices.