A Portable Low-Cost Wireless Electrocardiographic System for Home Health Care

According to the World Health Organization, heart disease is one of the main illnesses that leads the world ranking of disability-adjusted life years. This announcement justifies worldwide attempts towards the creation of home healthcare systems to allow remote access to patient electrocardiographic signals. To accomplish that, we started the development of a system comprised of two elements: a portable and low-cost one-channel electrocardiographic device capable of capturing signals and transmitting them wirelessly to an analysis software, either locally based or remote, and a Microsoft Windows-based software for receiving, storing, and exhibiting the electrocardiogram (ECG), besides performing multiple simultaneous analyses on the saved data, leading to multiparametric comprehension of electrophysiological scenarios. The capturing device is based on the ESP32 microcontroller and the BMD101 system-on-a-chip device for acquiring ECG signals. The Altium Design software was used to design the printed circuit board and the Solidworks platform for the assembly of the device case. The ECG workstation is under development, with its main feature being the wide use of DLLs for the inclusion of new analysis modules and new interfaces with external ECG acquisition devices, allowing easy upgrading and updating of its resources. Preliminary tests using a Bluetooth connection between the electrocardiographic device and the Workstation have shown good-quality ECG acquisition, a lossless data communication link, and an intuitive user interface for ECG visualization and analysis.