An Android-Based Heart Monitoring System for the Elderly and for Patients with Heart Disease

TLDR

Health monitoring is shifting from hospitals to portable personal devices. The study aims to develop a simple, accurate, inexpensive system that uses heart‑rate monitor data processed on a smartphone to generate health reports, store records, trigger emergency alerts, and connect to telemedicine. The system employs sophisticated algorithms to detect stress, classify arrhythmia events, and compute energy consumption. It is suitable for elderly and heart‑disease patients, enabling easy, immediate, economical remote health control without expensive hospital equipment.

Abstract

The current trend in health monitoring systems is to move from the hospital to portable personal devices. This work shows how consumer devices like heart rate monitors can be used not only for applications in sports, but also for medical research and diagnostic purposes. The goal pursued by our group was to develop a simple, accurate, and inexpensive system that would use a few pieces of data acquired by the heart rate monitor and process them on a smartphone to (i) provide detailed test reports about the user’s health state; (ii) store report records; (iii) generate emergency calls or SMSs; and (iv) connect to a remote telemedicine portal to relay the data to an online database. The system developed by our team uses sophisticated algorithms to detect stress states, detect and classify arrhythmia events, and calculate energy consumption. It is suitable for use by elderly subjects and by patients with heart disease (e.g., those recovering from myocardial infarction) or neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. Easy, immediate, and economical remote health control can therefore be achieved without the need for expensive hospital equipment, using only portable consumer devices.