Detecting patient's emergency - a minimum-computation procedure for pervasive cardiac monitoring

Searching for the economy and opportunities for applications of human experience yielded a development of a request-driven ECG interpretation method. It assumed the processing of the acquired ECG is triggered by the data validity period expiry or by the emergency detector continuously supervising basic parameters of the signal. This paper focus on the correct choice of the emergency detector procedure covering a wide range of diseases but not requiring much computational power in the patient-side wearable system. After the investigation of numerical complexity of the initial stages of ECG processing and representation of most common diseases in basic cardiac parameters, we propose a short-term rhythm index as an emergency indicator. The computation is simple enough to be performed in a limited-resources environment (e.g. cell phone) without considerably influencing its autonomy time.