Project Overview

The purpose of this project is to investigate the development of the software required for a wireless Electrocardiogram Device. The motivation for this project is to allow for twenty four hour ECG monitoring for a person with known heart problems. This constant monitoring is desirable because, if a major heart complication occurs medical help can be sent immediately. Also, valuable data on the behavior of the heart leading up to the incident can be recorded so that researchers can learn to spot warning signs and stop complications from ever happening.

The first area of research in this project was determining what an Electrocardiogram signal looked like, and how it corresponded to the behavior of the heart. Common heart conditions were analyzed to determine what they looked like on an ECG graph and an algorithm was created to identify the key variables on the graph. These variable values were then compared with the values indicating various heart conditions to determine the patient's current heart status.

It was found that to fully analyze the ECG signal it would require more computing power than a smartphone's processor could provide. At this point it was decided that only a partial analysis of the ECG signal would be completed and only some of the more serious heart anomalies that required immediate medical assistance would be searched for. To make up for this it was decided that the complete ECG signal would be recorded so that doctors and researchers could fully analyze the data at a future date.

Two different smartphone app development options were investigated, iOS and Android. It was found that development of the ECG software on the Android platform was more desirable for multiple reasons. One of the main reasons is that iPhones - which use iOS - do not have the option to have external SD cards. This is undesirable for recording the ECG signal because the data would need to be saved to the phone's internal storage which is untenable. The other main reason for choosing the Android platform is that it provides the option to run the app as a ‘service', which allows it to run constantly in the background while iOS does not provide this option to developers. After taking these factors into consideration, developing the app for Android is the recommended option.

For additional information please see the full report located in the Documents Section.