A Quality and Ergonomic Heart Monitoring Device with User-Friendly App for Telemedicine.

During recent decades, the elderly population has grown rapidly, and the number of patients with chronic heart-related diseases has exploded. Many of them (e.g., congestive heart failure, some types of arrhythmia) require close medical supervision, imposing a major burden on healthcare resources in most western economies. Telemedicine is clearly emerging as a viable solution for health care to become sustainable by enabling medical monitoring at home without direct professional help, which would greatly reduce assistance costs. Specifically, continuous or frequent arterial blood pressure (ABP) and electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring are important tools in the follow-up of many of these patients. A multipurpose (e.g. ABP and ECG) monitoring device that requires no medical assistance is highly desirable and would be of great value to patients. One such solution is presented and validated in this work. This paper presents the details of the proposed remote heart self-monitoring system, the testing procedure, and test results.