Portable 12-lead ECG Recorder

Heart disease has become a non-ignorable threat nowadays. Recently, one of the most common cardiac diseases, acute myocardial infarction (AMI), is becoming seriously because of its high risk. AMI occurs when the atherosclerotic plaque ruptures and blocks one or more coronary arteries. It would lead to heart failure or death. Among the diagnostic tests, electrocardiograph (ECG) is a widely accepted tool since its non-invasive and continuous monitoring. Generally, ST segment/T wave abnormalities, which are considered as the early sign of AMI, could be detected on 1-lead or 3-lead ECG. However, the information that 1-lead of 3-lead ECG could provide is not enough for the purpose of precise diagnosis. In the detection of highly time-dependent cardiac diseases, such as AMI, a 12-lead ECG is necessary. The aim of this study is to develop a portable device for real-time 12-lead ECG recording. At present, there are many systems for real-time ECG monitoring. Most of them afford three or less leads for recording and some of them with synthesized 12-lead ECG. However, a problem of the synthesized 12-lead ECG is that non-avoidable errors would be induced by the approximation in the synthesis process. On the other hand, if we try to record all of the 12-lead waveforms at the same time, the power consumption and the dimension of system will be 12 times of an 1-lead system. Therefore, the technique of multiplexing was applied in our design. Not only the size and power consumption were dramatically reduced, the bandwidth requirement was also decreased accordingly. A portable real-time 12-lead ECG recording system with low power consumption has been developed in this study. By the implementation of this system, we honestly hope that this device could be helpful in real-time monitoring of high-risk cardiac diseases.