Implimentation of a Telemedicine System for Rural Heathcare

Abstract

Medicine has always been a vital part of human existence but with the advent of technology this medicine has widened its influence with its evolution into Telemedicine. Telemedicine includes the use of communication and information technology for providing health care solutions to distant patients. With an aim to provide each and every individual quality health care services telemedicine has paved its way to rural areas. India is a country with second largest population in the world. According to the latest statistics India has 1 doctor for 2000 patients; these statistics have led to the widespread use of Telemedicine systems in India. With a greater demand of doctors and health care services these systems are gradually growing in number to provide effective health care solutions to patients. In our project, we have implemented a single channel telemedicine system for rural healthcare which measures the heart rate of the patient using ECG signal acquired from the patient. We are then processing this ECG signal in LabVIEW for noise removal and feature extraction. LabVIEW has various toolkits to process ECG signal. Specifically we are using biomedical and signal processing toolkits for this purpose. After the feature extraction we are calculating the heart rate of the patient to categorize it as bradycardia, tachycardia or normal. After the successful calculation and categorization of heart rate we attempt to send a signal to remote location using LabVIEW web publishing tool. Using this tool we have created a web page which we are displaying on the client computer by connecting to the web server created by the host computer using LabVIEW.