System for remote multichannel real-time monitoring of ECG via the Internet

Continuous physiological data monitoring of subjects has heretofore required the researcher to be in immediate proximity to the subject. Such 'bedside monitoring' is impractical in long-term studies, as often the subject and research facilities are in geographically disparate locations. Another limitation of existing technologies prohibits long-term data archiving without substantial user intervention. We constructed a novel hardware and software platform allowing us to visualize, via the Internet, encrypted real-time ECG signals from mice used in preclinical cardiovascular studies. As the design is highly modular, it can easily be adapted for use on different subjects and/or different signals of interest. The hardware consists of analog signal-conditioning PCBs (schematics on Physionet) and an A/D board with open-source APIs for digitizing data. In its current incarnation, the system simultaneously monitors ECGs of 16 mice with implanted electrodes, streaming the data to the network for remote visualization and to a RAID partition on the acquisition server for archiving purposes. As the mouse heart rate is roughly 10 times that of a human, the processing power and network bandwidth required of the system is equivalent to that needed to monitor 160 humans simultaneously. The system can collect data on multiple mice, with no user intervention, for months at a time. Data acquisition is controlled through an intuitive web interface that permits simple starting and stopping of acquisition while requiring the user to enter dam into a customizable HTML record that is written to an SQL database for accurate record-keeping. In the past 8 months we have collected and analyzed more data, with far less effort, than the formerly-used commercial system allowed in over two years. The remote visualization capability of our system has provided us unprecedented intuition and insight into long-term trends of cardiovascular disease of pre-clinical subjects. The database-driven web record entry has provided a paperless environment, replacing extensive manual logbook entries that once prevailed prior to long-term data collection capabilities.