Due to the proven efficiency of heart rate variability analysis as a non invasive method in the study of certain pathological and physiological states and given the multiplicity of the methods used by different authors, in this work we intend to compare two of the simplest and most efficient of them.
One of the biggest problems in hospitals today is the increase of costs associated with the treatment of patients, especially in the case of the elderly. This trend makes it necessary to adopt new strategies in order to reduce such costs and, at the same time, maintain high levels of care that is provided to patients. One way to reduce such costs is by moving patients to non-specialised areas or, if possible, to hidher home as soon as possible. In this paper we present a remote monitoring system capable of monitoring the state of a patient 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through the analysis of parameters extracted from the electrocardiographic signal (ECG) and reporting any anomaly to the hospital. One important feature of the system is its flexibility for providing users with access to monitoring information. In order to do so, the system is equipped with two complementary interfaces, being capable of giving integral access to monitoring information at any time, any place and from any location in an optimal manner. Kqwords - Telemonitoring of patients, telemedicine, ECG monitoring.
This paper presents an extensible distributed platform that aims to speed up the development of personalized telemedicine systems, dealing with a series of recurrent problems in this kind of system, particularly: (1) functionality encapsulation and reuse in a set of services; (2) communications between the patient's home and the hospital, through a flexible scheme for bidirectional message exchange; and (3) the interaction between patients and the system. Home supervision is carried out through last generation smartphones. To date, the platform has been used for the follow-up of patients with COPD and cardiovascular diseases.
This paper proposes a PDA-based system, SERVANDO, for the home-care management of patients with COPD. In addition to making the supervision of such patients easier, the system permits the collection and structuring of large quantities of information on the evolution of COPD, allowing the application of data-mining techniques, which could open up new lines of research on this disease.
A method is presented for the morphological characterization of QRS complexes by means of a syntactic signal processing process. A grammar that is based on the criteria and definitions established by the Common Standards in Electrocardiography Working Party (CSE) and that permits a direct approximation to the analysis of the ECG signal performed by the expert is described. The fact that the grammar proposed belongs to the category of regular grammars permits its implementation by means of a finite state automaton.
Sleep Apnea-Hypopnea Syndrome (SAHS) is usually diagnosed by polysomnography, a test that consists of the registration of a wide range of physiological parameters while the patient is asleep. The commercial monitoring devices used in the polysomnography generate a report summarizing the test. Some of the information presented to the clinicians in these reports, such as the Apnea-Hypopnea Index, has been the target of comprehensive clinical studies, and there are detailed clinical guidelines to interpret it. However, these reports also contain other data such as mean and maximum values of the descriptors of various pathological events recorded in the polysomnogram; e.g., the mean and maximum duration of the apneas, hypopneas and desaturations that the patient has experienced. These features have not been studied in the literature. Therefore, guidelines for their interpretation do not exist. This paper attempts to evaluate the usefulness of this information in the diagnosis of SAHS. It also tries to provide guidelines for clinicians on how to interpret it. To this end, we have calculated these features for 210 patients who underwent polysomnographic testing, and we have analyzed their capability to discriminate between healthy and SAHS patients, as well as to stratify the patients according to their severity. Our results suggest that most of them have little or no utility for diagnosing SAHS patients. Therefore, they could be omitted from the reports without significant loss of information.
Presents the results of the study carried out on a group of patients with ischemic episodes by way of the analysis of the heart rate variability (HRV). These results show the existence of determined HRV patterns associated with different types of ischemic episodes, which makes possible the use of this technique for the monitoring of myocardial ischemia. A methodology of heart rate signal processing has been used which is especially indicated for the study of short duration phenomena, such as ischemic episodes.