WE-CARE: An Intelligent Mobile Telecardiology System to Enable mHealth Applications

Recently, cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become one of the leading death causes worldwide, and it contributes to 41% of all deaths each year in China. This disease incurs a cost of more than 400 billion US dollars in China on the healthcare expenditures and lost productivity during the past ten years. It has been shown that the CVD can be effectively prevented by an interdisciplinary approach that leverages the technology development in both IT and electrocardiogram (ECG) fields. In this paper, we present WE-CARE , an intelligent telecardiology system using mobile 7-lead ECG devices. Because of its improved mobility result from wearable and mobile ECG devices, the WE-CARE system has a wider variety of applications than existing resting ECG systems that reside in hospitals. Meanwhile, it meets the requirement of dynamic ECG systems for mobile users in terms of the detection accuracy and latency. We carried out clinical trials by deploying the WE-CARE systems at Peking University Hospital. The clinical results clearly showed that our solution achieves a high detection rate of over 95% against common types of anomalies in ECG, while it only incurs a small detection latency around one second, both of which meet the criteria of real-time medical diagnosis. As demonstrated by the clinical results, the WE-CARE system is a useful and efficient mHealth (mobile health) tool for the cardiovascular disease diagnosis and treatment in medical platforms.

I. Introduction

The cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become the leading cause of human deaths, counting up to 29% of the total global deaths, based on the WHO's The World Health Report 2008 [1]. The main symptoms of cardiovascular disease include serious myocardial ischemia (acute myocardial infarction), heart failure, malignant arrhythmia, etc. As shown in [2], most of these symptoms can be foreknown by observing certain specific manifestations of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The ECG monitoring system has been used to detect such manifestations, and early detection can save valuable time for taking precautions against the cardiovascular disease. Thus, the prevention of cardiovascular disease using mobile ECG monitoring systems is of paramount significance, which has garnered great attentions from the research community.