An mHealth System for Monitoring of Children with Suspected Cardiac Arrhythmias

Arrhythmia is one of the most difficult problems in cardiology and especially in pediatric cardiology. In this study, the authors present a mobile health (m-health) system that can be used for continuous monitoring of children (ages 0-16 years) with suspected cardiac arrhythmias. The system is able to carry-out real-time acquisition and transmission of ECG signals, and facilitate an alarm scheme able to identify possible arrhythmias so as to notify the on-call doctor and the relatives of the child that an event or something that denotes malfunction is happening. In general the problem has been divided into two cases. The first case is called “in-house case”, where the subject is located in his/her house. While the second case is called “moving-patient case”, where the subject might be located anywhere else. The authors’ goal is the continuous 24 hours, monitoring of the child. During the “in house case”, a sensor network installed in the child’s house is used in order to continuously record ECG signals from the patient as well as environmental parameters. The second case is more general. For this case, the child is monitored using the same ECG recording device but the signals are transmitted, through a mobile device, directly to the central monitoring system. The transmission is performed through the use of 2.5G, or 3G, mobile communication networks. The system design, development and technical tests (using an ECG simulator and 20 volunteers) are reported in this paper. The future steps will be the further evaluation of the system on children with suspected cardiac arrhythmias.