Problems in archiving long-term continuous ECG data – a review

Measuring, recording and evaluating the various physiological patient parameters is one of our main challenge in healthcare sector recently. People are wearing different health monitoring sensors and there are already industry standards that can be used to store the measured individual data. Howe ver, many of these standards are incompatible with each other. Data processing and information mining of patient’s medical data requires generalized and well-defined data formats. Today’s monitoring tools - this paper focuses primarily on ECG equipments - are getting smaller and produce more and more data (often with higher resolution and more observed parameters). Remote monitoring of cardiovascular events and parameters are feasible, but digital archiving of ECG data at population level in Hungary is not fully solved yet. In our paper, we are focusing on remote monitoring of cardiac functions. We provide overview about the existing ECG data storage format standards and show their limitations.