m-QRS: An efficient QRS detection algorithm for mobile health applications

When using the available m-health systems, ECG data for a small duration is recorded and sent to a server for processing and arrhythmia detection. Since arrhythmia occurrence is not so frequent in early stages, a need is felt to develop a real time and continuous arrhythmia monitoring system on the phone itself. This paper provides a novel approach to detect QRS complexes from a high fidelity ECG data obtained from B.E.A.T. ® hardware for arrhythmia monitoring in real time. Our approach referred to as m-QRS uses continuous wavelet transform at its kernel and its efficiency is compared to that of Pan-Tompkins's which is a standard QRS detection algorithm widely used for arrhythmia detection. It was found that our algorithm uses lesser computation time when compared to Pan-Tompkins and was found to be mobile friendly. This provides an opportunity to develop further algorithms to perform continuous and real-time arrhythmia monitoring on affordable smartphones without internet dependability.