Health Status Remote Monitoring System: ECG Peaks Detection by Successive Thresholding Algorithm Employing Envelope Function

Today, there is a growing need for improved remote health monitoring solutions. For example, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 32Unfortunately, most existing systems have neither continuous data transmission, as they store and transmit data once (or a few times) per day, nor real-time capabilities, a very important and not obvious specification for a remote health monitoring system that triggers immediate actions to address unpredictable patient needs. In addition, the algorithms for the elaboration of vital parameters, especially those analyzing the ECG (electrocardiographic) signal, mainly apply a single peak detection method, resulting in many discarded peaks that could be useful instead. To these regards, this paper aims to propose an elaboration algorithm for the ECG signal where peaks detection (related to P-waves, T-waves and QRS complex) is obtained by the application of an envelope function and successive thresholding, which is sufficiently fast and simple to implement in a low-resource wearable device. A further aim is to provide continuous data acquisition and wireless transmission from the portable part to the system, with very low packet loss and real-time characteristics, using low-cost off-the-shelf devices.