title: A portable unit for remote monitoring of pacemaker patients.
abstract: The number of people with pacemakers has been steadily increasing over the past 20 years. At present there are about 2,500,000 in the world. All these patients must have a checkup twice a year in hospital, which involves the allocation of significant resources by the national health systems, not to speak of the inconvenience it entails for elderly subjects. Telemedicine can provide a partial solution to these problems. The present work describes a prototype system that transmits the patient's electrocardiograms and the main characteristics of the pacemaker to a monitoring centre. This remote monitoring system will be beneficial to patients and health-care organizations in terms of quality of life for the former, and costs and efficiency for the latter.
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy. ingbio@net.iss.it
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Barbaro
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bartolini
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bernarducci
mesh_terms: D015716:Electrocardiography, Ambulatory; D004867:Equipment Design; D006801:Humans; D010138:Pacemaker, Artificial; D017216:Telemedicine; D013686:Telemetry / Q000295:instrumentation*