Development of wearable heart disease monitoring and alerting system associated with smartphone

Heart disease has the second high mortality rate behind cancer in Japan, and requires quick treatment. To take a part in emerging mHealth, we developed a wearable heart disease monitoring and alerting system “Dentan”. Dentan continuously monitors patient's ECG in his/her daily activities and issues an alert to the patient as well as surrounding people if it detects abnormal heart behavior. Dentan consists of a wireless ECG sensor and a smartphone to achieve light-weighted, low-cost system that does not degrade the patient's Quality of Life. In parallel, we developed ECG analysis algorithm to detect R-wave as well as arrhythmia and performed demonstration experiments to validate its effectiveness. We implemented these algorithms in wireless ECG sensor rather than in smartphone to save power consumption of ECG sensor caused by radio communication.