Engineering, 2013, 5, 579-583 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/eng.2013.510B119 Published Online October 2013 (http://www.scirp.org/journal/eng) Copyright © 2013 SciRes. ENG Design and Development of a Two Channel Telemedicine System for Rural Healthcare Mitrra Potheri Ramesh, Shruthi Balasubramanian, Varsha Vijayan * , Geethanjali Balasubramanian, Mahesh Veezhinathan Department of Bio-Medical Engineering, SSN College of Engineering, Kalavakkam, Chennai, India Email: * varsha.bme@gmail.com Received 2013 ABSTRACT In this work, an attempt has been made to design an Electro Cardio Gram (ECG) and Photo Plethysmo Gram (PPG) based telemedicine system for rural health care. In India as per the survey conducted by Indian Medical Society in the year 2009, it has been revealed that only 2% of the qualified doctors practice in rural areas. Also, according to the sta- tistics taken by the World Health Organization, every year an estimated 17 million people die of various cardio vascular diseases. This paper introduces the transmission of ECG and PULSE from remote areas to the specialists’ office. The ECG and PPG signals are acquired, digitized and processed using LabVIEW for detection of heart and pulse rate. These data are transmitted using two methods namely Web publishing tool and Shared Variables. The results confirm the transfer of data with less than millisecond delay. Keywords: Telemedicine; ECG; LabVIEW; Web Publishing Tool; Shared Variables 1. Introduction Telemedicine is the process of communication of health- care related information from one place to another in the form of interactive audio visual media. The rapid ad- vancements in information and communication technol- ogy can be used to bridge the rural urban divide. This technique proves to be very important during life threat- ening situations and in places with lack of availability of specialists. Various methods of transmission of physiological data have been carried out previously. One such system uses Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to transmit data via Bluetooth [1]. Another system uses a wearable vital sign monitor that consists of a transmitter. It transmits the in- formation via a Home Gateway using a proprietary pro- tocol nRF24xx, to the central station [2]. The transmission has also been achieved using RF transmitter and receiver with slotted ALOHA for access by multiple users [3]. This paper deals with the acquisition, processing and transmission of ECG and PPG signals from the remote computer to the client using Web publishing tool and Shared Variables. Hence, the diagnosis of a rural patient can be facilitated by a city doctor with access to a com- puter installed with LabVIEW and Internet. Further, it eliminates the need for the conventional transmitter-re- ceiver with limited range. The other applications include transmission of vital details from ICU to the doctor’s cabin and future developments can be done in transmit- ting the parameters to specialist who is based anywhere in the world. 2. Materials and Methods 2.1. Experimental Setup The ECG-based telemedicine system [4] mainly consists of the following five parts—1) Data acquisition system; 2) Amplification of the acquired signals using hardware modules; 3) Physiological signal reception in computer; 4) Signal processing and display; 5) Web publishing tool and Shared Variables for viewing the signals on a browser at a remote computer. The signals can be viewed and controlled from both the remote computer (server) and the clients’ side. 2.2. Data Acquisition System The ECG data is acquired from surface electrode using Standard Recording Protocol. The acquired ECG is then amplified using a hardware module with IC AD620. The pulse signal is acquired using a Pulse Oximeter and am- plified using IC LM324. The amplified signals are then given as input to the three part NI-ELVIS system, the NI-ELVIS workstation (prototype board) that interfaces with the NI-DAQ (data acquisition) device and Lab- VIEW software. NI ELVIS has a sampling rate of 1.25 * Corresponding author.