Simple electrocardiogram (ECG) signal analyzer for homecare system among the elderly

This study presents a simple electrocardiogram (ECG) signal analyzer for homecare system among the elderly. It can transmit ECG signals of patient around his/her house through Bluetooth to computers in house. ECG signals are analyzed by the computer. If abnormal case of heartbeat is found, the emergency call is automatically dialed. Meanwhile, the determined heartbeat case of ECG signals will be forwarded to patient's MD through internet. Therefore, the patient can do whatever he/she wants around his/her house with our proposed simple cardiac arrhythmias signal analyzer. The proposed consists of five major processing stages: (i) preprocessing stage for enlarging ECG signals' amplitude and eliminating noises; (ii) ECG signal transmitter/receiver stage, ECG signals are transmitted through Bluetooth to the signal receiver in patient's house; (iii) QRS extraction stage for detecting QRS waveform using the Difference Operation Method (DOM) method; (iv) qualitative features stage for qualitative feature selection on ECG signals; and (v) classification stage for determining patient's heartbeat cases using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method. In the experiment, the total classification accuracy (TCA) was approximately 93.19% in average.