Viewpoint

Michael Breuz, TMA-Medical, A

Introduction

The R&D group of TMA-Medical is putting lots of effort to find an innovative way of an Real Time ECG Data Transmission over small bandwidth. As the high bandwidth like UMTS and GPRS wont be available on country side during the next 5 to 10 years and as specially there the Telemedicine ECG solutions are highly needed, the solution has to work with a small bandwidth of i.e. 9600Baud. To transmit 12 Leads in real time with this limited bandwidth, a special protocol therefore has to be found.

Aim of TMA-Medical for the Open ECG Meeting

To find a general solution for our investigations mentioned above, our goal for the break out session in Crete was to find out, in which direction the ecg transmission standard world wide will go.
Bringing some inputs to the standardization committee specially for this kind of Telemedicine Solutions.
Furthermore, certification possibilities should be found.
To find Partners for a Framework Project within the EU, where we can bring in our Telemedicine knowledge.

Conclusion

The sessions and workshops of the 1st Open ECG Break Out Session in Crete were highly interesting for TMA-Medical. The organization and the program was excellent, specially to find answers to several questions for our actual R&D investigations. Furthermore, there was also the possibility to bring in our Telemedicine Know How concerning 12 Lead Real Time ECG Data Transmission:

Interoperability and 12 Lead Real Time ECG Data Transmission doesn't fit together on device level. There is too much overhead and too less bandwidth using the SCP-ECG standard protocol from device to host.
On the other side, from host to host the SCP-ECG protocol is excellent and should be pushed world wide.
So our recommendation is to focus on the host to host standardization and leave the device to host protocol proprietary.
Our policy is to put as less as possible electronics in the ecg acquisition device on patient side and to increase functionality on expert side in a center or ICU. The base idea is to bring medicine to the patient at home. For this the price of the devices is essential. A LCD display and buttons, which are needed to receive and view a SCP-ECG file locally (interoperability on device level), are not really suggestive, as the patient can't interpret the ecg. The user interface for the patient has to be as simple as possible.

With the OpenECG project, one SCP-ECG certification possibility was found. We already used this possibility and we had very good experience.

With the entrance to the Industry Advisory Board, we hope to find common projects with other companies and organizations and on the other hand, we hope to continuing bringing in our Telemedicine know how into standardization processes.

Michael Breuss
CTO-TMA-Medical Ltd.

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