Capturing, analysing, and managing ECG sensor data in handheld devices

The new advances in sensor technology, PDAs and wireless communication favour the development of monitoring systems. In this context we have developed MOLEC, a system that monitors people that suffer from heart arrhythmias. It carries out three tasks: a) it captures the digital data sent by different sensors and transforms them into a concrete format; b) it analyses the ECG data sent by the PDA sensors to locally detect anomalous situations as soon as possible; c) it manages ECG data in the following way: 1) normal ECG data are stored in files and are sent compressed to a hospital, within a certain time granularity; and 2) when anomalous ECG data are identified an alarm is sent to the hospital; and also these anomalous ECG are stored at the PDA database. Data in that database can be queried, locally or remotely, in order to know different aspects that can be related to anomalous situations.