Abstract

BUSTAMANTE, John; SAENZ, José F  and  AMAYA, Adrián A. Monitor of cardiac events implemented in PDA platform. Rev. Col. Cardiol. [online]. 2007, vol.14, n.2, pp.78-86. ISSN 0120-5633.

Ambulatory monitoring of electro-cardiac events constitutes a valuable tool in the diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias involved in pathologic processes such as myocardiopathies, post-infarction stages, autonomous cardiac system injuries, etc.; unfortunately, its extensive use is not possible yet, due to the high costs that imply the acquisition of these equipments. For this purpose, through the utilization of personal digital assistants, a monitor of cardiac events with pre and post-symptomatic recording capacity, electrocardiographic signal visualization in real time, automatic recording of bradycardias and tachycardias and the possibility of annotation of symptoms by the patient, is designed and developed. It consists of a hardware component for the acquisition and treatment of the signals, a software for the monitoring in Palm OSÒ platform and an appliance for the discharge and analysis of the stored data. Prototype validations were realized through an electrocardiographic simulator, an arrhythmia simulator based on arrhythmia data base registers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Beth Israel Hospital and on pilot tests of healthy people and of patients with arrhythmias. In this preliminary report, we show the way in which the developed prototype constitutes a viable alternative for ambulatory monitoring of arrhythmia, taking advantages of the storage capacity, processing and visualization that have the actual digital assistances with the additional advantages that its use is not restricted to only one utility and its economic accessibility is facilitated due to its wide commercial availability.

Keywords : events monitoring; electrocardiography; biomedical signal processing; arrhythmias; personal digital assistant.