A Low Cost Remote Cardiac Monitoring Framework for Rural Regions

Cardiovascular diseases in rural developing countries take a large toll of human lives, due to inadequate quality health care facilities and their limited reach to the patients. The burgeoning population of developing nations make the linear organic scaling of health care facilities impractical to cater the diverse rural geography. Hence it is imperative to scale the health care facilities through wireless communication technologies in an affordable manner. Timely analysis of ECG data is critical for early diagnosis and treatment of several cardiovascular diseases. With this aim, a wearable wireless ECG monitoring framework, named as Amrita-Spandanam was designed. This framework consist of a patient wearable device and a patient smart phone with Amrita-Spandanam application, enabling a doctor/hospital to monitor the remote patient through his internet connected mobile phone or web browser. The framework does the post analysis of the ECG signal using a backend server to disseminate warnings to the doctor and the patient. Several de-noising algorithms were applied to the acquired ECG signal prior to this post analysis. The framework was implemented successfully enabling real time remote monitoring of the cardiac patients in rural villages.