IETE Technical Review
Vol 23, No 5, September-October 2006, pp 277-282

Wireless Communication based Portable
Telecardiology System for Rural Health Care
S MITRA, J BERA, M MITRA, S SENGUPTA

Department of Applied Physics, Faculty of Technology, University of Calcutta,
92, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Roy Road, Kolkata 700 009, India.
email: susa68@hotmail.com, jitendrabera@rediffmail.com
madhuchanda94@rediffmail.com, samarsgp@vsnl.net

AND

B B ROY CHAUDHURY

Indian Statistical, Institute, 203 BT Road, Kolkata 700 008, India.
email: bbc@isical.ac.in

A scheme for development of a complete diagnostic telecardiology system for rural health care is described in this paper. The developed system having two separate blocks, first of which will be carried at patient bedside and contains a portable ECG machine interfaced with a micro-controller-based full duplex communication system capable of transmitting ECG signals over a distance of about 5-7 km through a cordless phone. The second block is a PC based system, to be placed at the rural health-care centre. This system will generate an initial report about the abnormality of the incoming ECG from an inbuilt knowledge base, which was developed from feedback of different cardiologists and after consultation of different medical books. The generated report will then be sent back to the patient by the system. The main advantage of the system is that it will not require the presence of any doctor at initial stage. The ECG of the patient with critical abnormality or unknown abnormality will be directly sent to the doctors automatically and intimation will also be sent to the patient directly

1. INTRODUCTION

ELECTROCARDIOGRAPHY is an effective non-invasive diagnostic technique, which is widely used by cardiologists. Electrocardiogram (ECG) are electrical views of the heart, recorded by placing electrodes on the patient’s body. ECG provides the cardiologist with useful information about the rhythm and functioning of the heart. On the other hand, heart disease is one of the most common cause of death all over the world. Different statistical surveys indicate that heart disease especially ischemic heart disease (IHD) is becoming a major health burden also in India. Those surveys also show a steady increase of IHD throughout India. So, advanced research is needed for developing more cost effective technologies as a preventive measure against this silent killer.

Most of the rural health centers of India suffer from lack of doctors, especially the cardiologists. So people of those regions cannot achieve proper cardiac care at proper time. Telecardiology systems are becoming popular today especially for the people at this remote facility.

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Paper No 45D; Copyright © 2006 by the IETE.

 

World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes it as very effective, low-cost and realistic system.

Conventional telemedicine systems using public switched telephone network (PSTN) landlines are already available to enable a doctor to monitor a patient remotely for home care or emergency applications [1-4].

Mobile telemedicine is a new research area that exploits recent advances in cellular telecommunications networks, which provide the potential for highly flexible medical services that are not possible with standard telephony. A prototype integrated mobile telemedicine system that is compatible with existing mobile telecommunications networks and upgradeable for use with third-generation networks is reported [5]. A new micro-controller-based system is developed in which patients can be monitored 24 hours-a-day in nearly any environment using modern telecommunication techniques. Pathological changes are detected by an on-line feature extraction and fuzzy classification technique.

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