A portable unit for remote monitoring of pacemaker patients.

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.