1. INTRODUCTION
According to World Health Organization (WHO) Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is a one of the leading cause of the
death worldwide. The high cost of care, lower quality of life and premature death causes a big burden on society
.The monitoring of patients physiological information are very important for the further treatment. Many patients
can benefit from continuous monitoring as a part of diagnostic procedure. The remote monitoring also enables the
patients to live his normal live and to decreasing the cost of healthcare. Electrocardiography (ECG) is the process of
recording the electrical activity of the heart over a period of time using electrodes placed on the skin. These
electrodes detect the tiny electrical changes on the skin that arise from the heart muscle’s electro physiologic pattern
of depolarizing and repolarizing during each heartbeat. It is a very commonly performed cardiology test. Hence our
aim is to design and implement an ECG measurement device and an App system based on the Android OS platform
which can monitor and diagnose patients’ heart conditions in real time. This system can useful especially by patient
like senior citizens or having physical disabilities or who are alone. Therefore, this system can be utilized for remote
medical systems to assist the elderly patients, for self-testing diagnostics, or for physicians to diagnose diseases of
the circulatory system. Android is a platform of choice because of its availability on most mobile phones apart from
strong existing and future growth prospect. The android platform based smart phone will be used for diagnosis and
will also be transmit captured images to a care givers , health care centers or medical professionals for specialist
advice.
2. SYSTEM MODEL
An ECG is a way to measure and diagnose abnormal rhythms of the heart, and helps to diagnose properly. An ECG
is used to measure the regularity and rate of heartbeats also in the position and size of the chambers, the existence of
any damage to the heart, and the impact of devices or drugs used to regulate the heart. ECG device is real time
continuously attended ambulatory cardiac monitoring system. The system as in figure 1.1 consists of three modules;
the patients ECG acquisition device, cloud server, and the control unit in the mobile phone. Here we uses the three
electrodes out of three out of three the one electrode is connect on the right arm of the patient’s body another is
connect on the left arm and the last one is connect on the left leg of the patient’s body. These electrodes convert the
ionic potential of the patient into the electrical potential. This signal is in the digital form the arduino processing on
this signal and converts it in analog form which is coming from the heart rate monitor unit. His ECG will be
recorded continuously on real time basis. The Ethernet shield is communicate with the cloud server through that
then the data is sent to the mobile device of the patient, where it is processed, filtered, and plotted in the form of
actual ECG waveform. This ECG signal is then sent to the server and sends this information to the concerned doctor
along with the patient’s basic information, so that the doctor can see the ECG of patient directly on his mobile
phone. Thus, this system has immediate, 24 hour access to a doctor to review transmitted data and make clinical
decisions regarding the patient. The physician can assist the patient in case of an emergency.
ECG is a graph showing electrical activity of the heart. It is a trace of voltage generated by the cardiac muscle
during a heartbeat as shown in fig.1.The heart generates an electrochemical impulse that spreads out in the heart in
such a fashion as to cause the cells to contract and relax in a timely order and thus gives the heart pumping
characteristics. This electrochemical action can be measured at the surface of the body. An actual voltage potential
of approximately 1 mv develops between various body points. ECG signal from electrodes is very low amplitude
signal nearly 0.8 to 1.2 mv which is amplified and filtered by signal conditioning circuit.
3. HARDWARE REQUREMENT
Any system is consists of hardware part as well as some of software part. This system requires hardware namely
electrodes, heart rate monitor circuit, ardiuno board, Ethernet shield and the display unit means LCD. The function
and the operation of each unit is as follows
3.1 Electrodes
ECG is the process of recording the electrical activity of the heart over a period of time using electrodes placed on
the skin. An electrode is a conductive pad in contact with the body that makes an electrical circuit with the
electrocardiograph. These electrodes detect the tiny electrical changes on the skin that arise from the heart muscles.
In this project three electrodes are used each electrode is made up of an electrically conductive gel. These skin gel
which is made up of sliver chloride (AgCl) which is used to apply the interface between the skin and the electrodes
to reduce the impedance of the skin and fast pickup of the electrical surface activities.
3.2 Heart Rate Monitor
In this project we used the AD8232 is a Single Lead Heart Rate Monitor is a cost-effective board used to measure
the electrical activity of the heart. This electrical activity can be charted as an ECG or Electrocardiogram and output
as an analog reading. ECGs can be extremely noisy, the AD8232 Single Lead Heart Rate Monitor acts as an op amp
to help obtain a clear signal from the PR and QT Intervals easily. The AD8232 is an integrated signal conditioning
block for ECG and other biopotential measurement applications. It is designed to extract, amplify, and filter small
biopotential signals in the presence of noisy conditions, such as those created by motion or remote electrode
placement. The AD8232 Heart Rate Monitor breaks out nine connections from the IC that you can solder pins,
wires, or other connectors to. SDN, LO+(Leads off detect+), LO-(Leads off detect-), OUTPUT, 3.3V, GND provide
essential pins for operating this monitor with an Arduino or other development board. Also provided on this board
are RA (Right Arm), LA (Left Arm), and RL (Right Leg) pins to attach and use your own custom sensors.
Additionally, there is an LED indicator light that will pulsate to the rhythm of a heart beat.
3.3 Arduino Board
The Arduino Uno is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328 (datasheet). It has 14 digital input/output pins
(of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz ceramic resonator, a USB connection, a power
jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply
connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started. The Uno
differs from all preceding boards in that it does not use the FTDI USB-to-serial driver chip. Instead, it features the
Atmega16U2 (Atmega8U2 up to version R2) programmed as a USB-to-serial converter.
3.4 Ethernet Shield
The Arduino Ethernet Shield allows an Arduino board to connect to the internet. It is based on the Wiznet W5100
ethernet chip (datasheet). The Wiznet W5100 provides a network (IP) stack capable of both TCP and UDP. It
supports up to four simultaneous socket connections. Use the Ethernet library to write sketches which connect to the
internet using the shield. The ethernet shield connects to an Arduino board using long wire-wrap headers which
extend through the shield. This keeps the pin layout intact and allows another shield to be stacked on top.
4. ANDROID APPLICATION
Android is an open source and Linux-based Operating System for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet
computers. The main objective of this paper is that by using android platform we can produce the prototype for
portable ECG. In this project “Thing Speak” application will be used to display the ECG data signal sent from the
ECG circuit. According to its developers, “Thing Speak is an open source Internet of Things (IoT) application and API
to store and retrieve data from things using the HTTP protocol over the Internet or via a Local Area Network. Thing
Speak enables the creation of sensor logging applications, location tracking applications, and a social network of
things with status updates”. Thing Speak was originally launched by ioBridge in 2010 as a service in support of IOT
applications.
4. CONCLUSION
An effective heart attack detection system is proposed in this work. It helps to reduce deaths caused by heart attacks
since the main cause of heart attack deaths are due to delay in proper treatment. This can be avoided since the
system will acts as a virtual doctor for the patients with the used of this the patients can avoid the regular visit to the
clinic for checkup so it saves the time of the patients. In this work, an android application was proposed which can
continuously receive ECG signals from acquisition device wirelessly; it computes heart rate and plot the real time
ECG signal on mobile phone for displaying. Also, it can be used to send information to concerned physician via
server for medical diagnosis. Experiments show that the proposed system is unobtrusive and can be comfortably use
by the user during daily activities.
5. REFERENCES
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