Indigenous development of transputer based real time ECG arrhythmia monitoring station

A real time bedside arrhythmia monitor in ICCU is a very useful aid to doctors for monitoring the patients around the clock. Most of the systems which are currently available in the market are based on mainframes and are very costly. Moreover these systems focus on few particular abnormalities. The authors have developed a system which is capable of performing exhaustive diagnosis of ECG under real time conditions. The major advantage of this system being cost effectiveness. The arrhythmia monitoring has been designed on a PC-AT 386 platform using transputers which perform multiple tasks in parallel. The system is designed to perform the analysis of ECG on three leads simultaneously. The diagnosis on each lead is independent of the other in the sense that even if the data on one of the channels is absent the system continues to work on data from the other two channels. The algorithm for diagnosis makes use of the RR-interval rhythm and QRS, 'p' and 't' wave morphologies for arriving at the final analysis decision. The system is capable of detecting up to 14 major types of arrhythmias with different types under each adding the total types of arrhythmias detected to be around 70. The system provides a display of vital parameters for which a GUI has been developed. The information which fan be displayed, without interrupting the diagnosis include QRS morphology patterns, trend charts for various parameters such as RR intervals and heart rate, on-line display of ECG waveforms and the arrhythmia alarming. The display provides various options such as expansion of waveform or compression. It also allows the user to select between the filtered and unfiltered data to be displayed on the screen.