Project: electro-cardiographic data collection system

Abstract

This project was inspired by the need for new and better techniques for the diagnosis of patients with the potential for heart failure due to ventricular arrhythmias. This type of fatal accident is accountable for 300,000 deaths a year in this country alone. I met with a number of Doctors and Research Engineers to explore the approaches to the development of new techniques to meet this critical requirement. Since there is a minimum of dollars available to support this research, it was imperative to come up with a low cost approach. The tradeoffs were: (1) Modify available equipment. (2) Design new equipment in house. (3) Use a consultant to minimize cost and time. These alternative approaches were compared in detail to find the most cost effective approach.