Electronic processing of cardiac rehabilitation data

With the incidence of ischaemic heart disease at epidemic levels and rising, techniques for detecting, predicting, and rehabilitating the condition of cardiac dysfunction are constantly under development. One technique, that of exercise stress testing, has been used in recent decades in the prediction, detection, and rehabilitation of cardiopulmonary disease. However, ergometric studies in this regard have been hampered by the tedium of physiologic data collection and analysis. With the advent of automated digital and analogue computation procedures and equipment, such data can be both operated on real-time for immediate display or stored for post-exercise and patient-history studies. Such automated data manipulation provides an systematic and comprehensive testing of each patient and permits a much greater case-load. In addition, special computer programs can compile and index specific parameters from a large sample size to facilitate statistical surveys of selected patient populations. The results of such statistical analyses can, if desired, be automatically printed out in a graphical form.