1 Authors: Conf.dr.ing. E. Mârza and As.ing. C. Simu are with Electronics and Telecommunications Faculty from “Politehnica” University of Timişoara. A Solution for Short / Long Distance Wireless ECG Telemonitoring Călin Simu 1 Abstract: Home patient telemonitoring has become an important procedure in the domain of telemedicine, due to its advantages in time and cost reducing, both for the patient and the doctor. The paper deals with the possibilities of developing a real time, wireless, ECG telemonitoring system which is able to monitor the patient over a short distance (in an indoor environment), or a long distance (in an outdoor environment). The proposed system may be implemented in a hospital or at the patient’ s residence and provides a medium level of mobility for the patient, even far from the hospital. Keywords: telemedicine, ECG telemonitoring, Bluetooth, WiMAX. 1. INTRODUCTION Telemedicine is a closely related term with Telehealth and eHealth and represents the use of telecommunications for the exchange of information and data relevant to diagnosis / treatment, or to provide health services, at distant sites, and it can be applied in almost all situations in which distance represents a critical element. Telemedicine has as main objectives: telemetry, remote monitoring of patients at home, full medical assistance in case of accidents or disasters, medical information exchange between isolated areas and medical centers or between medical centers, telesurgery, teleeducation etc. The advantages of telemedicine are: distance-time and cost reduction for emergencies and medical assistance, quality improvement of medical services, improvement of the access to the medical information (for medical stuff and for population), a new market for medical & telecommunications methods / products / services. Telemonitoring, a sub-domain of telemedicine, represents the process of using audio, video and other telecommunications and electronic information processing technologies to monitor the health status of a patient, from a distance. An ideal telemonitoring service should have at least the following features: a) a free-to-move (domestically) patient would be monitored from remote, whenever the sensor is attached to his body; b) the patient should not be required to do a complicated sequence of actions to activate the link with the health center; c) the system should offer a full area coverage, with a high quality of service; d) the installation of the telemonitoring system should be straightforward; e) the transmitted information should be kept strictly confidential. On the other hand, coronary artery disease remains the leading cause of death almost all over the world (annually, cardiovascular diseases contribute with about 33% to the global mortality), sometimes due to the lack of an adequate medical surveillance. This emphasizes the need for on-line, distant monitoring of patient and his vital functions (mainly his ECG). In section 2 we present an overview of ECG monitoring equipments and we offer a study of data rates required for a good signal quality. Section 3 deals with the wireless telemonitoring methods and justifies the technologies selected to use. In sections 4 and 5 we briefly present the Bluetooth and WiMAX technologies, respectively. Section 6 presents our conclusions. 2. ECG MONITORING There are several clinical (during a surgical intervention, several days after a miocardial infarction incident etc.) and non-clinical (emergencies or calamities, people deploying dangerous activities, elderly people at home, cardiac patients at home etc.)