OURSES: A telemedicine project for rural areas in france. Telemonitoring of elderly people

Several telemedicine applications are proposed within the frame of OURSES project, French acronym for Offer of Rural Use of Services by Satellite, providing services for elderly people. The main objective of this project is to show the interest of using satellites as a complement to terrestrial technologies, in areas where telecommunication infrastructure is lacking or incomplete. This paper describes one of these applications: an ECG monitoring system. This telemonitoring system allows, thanks to a wireless wearable sensor, to detect possible cardiac problems of elderly people. ECG signals are analyzed through signal processing algorithms and if some abnormal condition is detected, an alarm is raised and sent via satellite to the physician's office. The corresponding physician is able to access at any time the recorded ECG signals, whenever he is willing to, in the presence of an alarm or not. This allows a constant monitoring of the elderly people. Tests realized in a real environment have demonstrated the feasibility and the interest of this application.