Executive Summary

Electrocardiography (ECG) is one of the tools of cardiac monitoring. Dilemma is that despite the installation of hundreds of ECG machines in hospitals and clinics throughout the country, patients with severe arrhythmic abnormalities are often misdiagnosed or mistreated usually in rural areas due to unavailability of expert cardiologists at the ECG monitoring station. Moreover, most ECG machines presently installed do not have capabilities like High Resolution signal acquisition, remote monitoring, real time data storage and patient database management.

The project proposes to develop a prototype system to demonstrate geographically distributed installation of network enabled ECG recording and analysis stations with normal and High Resolution digital ECG machines capable of self diagnosing a patient for different arrhythmic abnormalities as well as early detection of risks associated with fatal arrhythmias which can lead to sudden cardiac death by running state of the art signal processing algorithm. The system will provide 24/7 ECG recording and analysis facility with universal connectivity through dialup, Ethernet, GPRS, Radio and Satellite for connection to the central server located in the Cardiac Control Center (CCC) of a Central Hospital. The system will also have capability to provide expert opinion to patients with severe arrhythmic abnormalities by transmitting their physiological data to the cardiologists at a central hospital through a universal communication device already developed in CARE. Here the expert cardiologists will receive ECG data and profile of patients with severe arrhythmic abnormalities and suggest treatment in real time. The ECG record and the patient profile would be stored at the server and a database for patients and their cardiac history would be managed for future reference as well as for off-line analysis and data-mining.

The key benefits of this project are given below:

• This system would make capabilities like High Resolution signal acquisition, remote monitoring, real time data storage and patient database management.
• The system could also be installed in ICU and CCU units in hospitals where issues like digital storage and automatic alarm triggering can be very useful. The system would form a single self-intelligent workstation able to diagnose the patient for different arrhythmias and alarm the Server, Clinical Alarm Station (CAS), in case of emergency and provide treatment to patients in real time. It would also alert the patients for any risks of path-o-physiological disorders.
• It will develop and establish a gateway and Cardiac Control Center (CCC) at a central hospital to receive physiological data from remote patients and provide them consultations from expert cardiologists and maintain repository to keep ECG records for future reference and data mining.
• This project will benefit needs of a common man and improve health standards and facilities in Pakistan remarkably. Patients would benefit most as they won’t have to wait in long queues to get their ECG taken and consultation from an expert cardiologist in any emergency. People would also benefit from telemedicine technology thereby getting effective treatment even in remotest regions of the country. Medical Professionals and cardiologists, in particular, would benefit by attending their patients remotely.
• The project would lay foundation to undertake projects in Biomedical Engineering.
• The developed technology would also have a huge international market.