Portable electrocardiogram device using Android smartphone.

Portable electrocardiogram (ECG) capturing device can be interfaced to a smart phone installed with an android-based application (app). This app processes and analyses the data sent by the device to provide an interpretation of the patient/user's heart current condition (e.g.: beats per minute, heart signal waveform, R-R interval). The ECG recorded by the app is stored in the smart phone's Secure Digital (SD) card and cloud storage which can be accessed remotely by a physician to aid in providing medical diagnosis. The project aims to help patients living at a far distance from hospitals and experience difficulty in consulting their physician for regular check-ups, and assist doctors in regularly monitoring their patient's heart condition. The hardware data acquisition device and software application were subjected to trials in a clinic with volunteer-patients to measure the ECG and heart rate, data saving speed on the SD card, success rate of the saved data and uploaded file. Different ECG tests using the project prototype were done for 12 patients/users and yielded a reading difference of 7.61% in an R-R interval reading and 5.35% in heart rate reading as compared with the cardiologist's conventional 12-electrode ECG machine. Using the developed ECG device, it took less than 5 seconds to save ECG reading using SD card and approximately 2 minutes to upload via cloud.