OURSES: A telemedicine project for rural areas in france. Telemonitoring of elderly people

Several telemedicine applications are proposed within the frame of OURSES project, French acronym for Offer of Rural Use of Services by Satellite, providing services for elderly people. The main objective of this project is to show the interest of using satellites as a complement to terrestrial technologies, in areas where telecommunication infrastructure is lacking or incomplete. This paper describes one of these applications: an ECG monitoring system. This telemonitoring system allows, thanks to a wireless wearable sensor, to detect possible cardiac problems of elderly people. ECG signals are analyzed through signal processing algorithms and if some abnormal condition is detected, an alarm is raised and sent via satellite to the physician's office. The corresponding physician is able to access at any time the recorded ECG signals, whenever he is willing to, in the presence of an alarm or not. This allows a constant monitoring of the elderly people. Tests realized in a real environment have demonstrated the feasibility and the interest of this application.

[1]  A. Bugarin,et al.  Syntactic Characterization Of QRS Morphology , 1991, Proceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Volume 13: 1991.

[2]  H. Gholam-Hosseini,et al.  Detection and extraction of the ECG signal parameters , 1998, Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Vol.20 Biomedical Engineering Towards the Year 2000 and Beyond (Cat. No.98CH36286).

[3]  Szi-Wen Chen,et al.  A two-stage discrimination of cardiac arrhythmias using a total least squares-based Prony modeling algorithm , 2000, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng..

[4]  Willis J. Tompkins,et al.  A Real-Time QRS Detection Algorithm , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[5]  W.J. Tompkins,et al.  A patient-adaptable ECG beat classifier using a mixture of experts approach , 1997, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[6]  Diego Cabello,et al.  Arrhythmia Monitoring Using Fuzzy Reasoning , 1990, [1990] Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[7]  W. Tompkins,et al.  Time domain based algorithm for detection of ventricular fibrillation , 1997, Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. 'Magnificent Milestones and Emerging Opportunities in Medical Engineering' (Cat. No.97CH36136).

[8]  Ali Cinar,et al.  Interpreting ECG data by integrating statistical and artificial intelligence tools. , 2002, IEEE engineering in medicine and biology magazine : the quarterly magazine of the Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society.

[9]  Peter M. Clarkson,et al.  Prony residual analysis for the identification of cardiac arrhythmias , 1995, 1995 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.