A Wearable Electrocardiogram Recorder (ECG) Using ISO / IEEE 11073 Interoperability Standard

Abstract

Emerging technologies enable new health delivery services based on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) concepts, Ubiquitous Health (U-Health) paradigm, and patient empowerment. However, these services show several drawbacks, being the lack of standardization one of the most important. The under development ISO/IEEE 11073 for Personal Health Devices (X73PHD) has substantially evolved during the last years. It defines the interface between agents and managers. Nevertheless, this standard has not been broadly tested. This paper presents a proof-of-concept implementation of a Electrocardiogram (ECG) recorder used in a real U-Health service. The functional model of this agent proposes several solutions to problems that, being out of X73PHD scope, were found during the implementation process. The hardware architecture describes four blocks: ECG acquisition and conditioning, storage, Bluetooth communication, and microcontroller. This paper also describes the Domain Information Model (DIM) used to model the agent and its objects. One of them is the Medical Device System (MDS). It provides general information about the agent. Another one is the ECG waveform object which represents the acquired ECG signal. In addition, the Device Status object indicates events related to malfunction. The last object defined is the periodic scanner which gathers observations and reports them to the manager. In addition, the service and communication models are also described. The former implements mandatory object access procedures. The latter defines association procedures and transport profiles, including Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP). The ECG recorder is integrated into a U-Health interoperable service using Android 4.0 smartphones and X73PHD.