Portable electrocardiography with cloud based features: A review of current technologies

Abstract

With recent trend of mobile devices being affordable and handy, portable electrocardiography (ECG) composed in smart and compact systems for use in out-of-hospital settings are being made commercially available. Mobile ECG devices are important medical innovation which has high potential to transform to homecare. We performed this review to learn on the current availability of portable ECG mobile technologies with respect to their scope, ease of use, data transmission capabilities, diagnostic accuracy and cloud based features. We conducted and Internet searches for "handheld" or "patch" or "portable" electrocardiography devices to enlist current available technologies. We also searched specific mobile ECG devices to obtain additional citations. We classified available devices as a "single limb lead ECG recording devices" and chest-lead "ECG recording devices." Three electrodes ECG devices also defined as the conventional electrocardiography or Holter machine are excluded from this review. A total of 12 devices have been reviewed and identified as "handheld", "patch" and "portable" with four devices fall into each of the categories. Nine of the reviewed ECG devices have electrode attachment in the chest and the rest are handheld devices. All devices are very lightweight as they weight under 150g and easy to bring everywhere. We concluded that the number of available devices that can record and analyze ECG signals is on the rise. ECG devices with cloud based monitoring and analysis system involves various fields such as sensor technology, communication, software design, signal processing and data mining.