A Proposition for Low Cost Preventive Cardiology for Rural Health Care System

Recent studies indicate that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for several million people annually. New habits, practices and lifestyles have introduced newer ailments that the public health care system of a country has not always been able to cope up with. Of late, need for effective preventive cardiology has been advocated by several researchers[Pad’05]. An important component of effective preventive cardiology is to collect, monitor and maintain health data of the target population [Low’01], [Gup’01], [NCMH’05], [Roy’03] over an extended period of time. In this paper, we propose a low cost methodology for collection, distribution and dissemination of information related to the cardio vascular system for rural population in a developing country. The authors have developed a low cost version of a data collection equipment. Such a signal acquisition equipment, along with a few accessories may be sufficient for several tasks such as: a) collection of preliminary health data from house to house for a large population group, b) storing the data conveniently, c) basic analysis of data and diagnosis and d) transmission of data to the higher referral centre within a radius of 810 Kms even without the requirement of any conventional network connectivity. Sample waveforms for several biomedical signals have also been presented.