Cogent Software

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans experience sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), a medical emergency in which the ventricles of the heart suddenly cease to effectively contract. Invariably, SCA leads to death within minutes if left untreated. Foruntately, heart-beat rhythm abnormalaties, known as arrhythmias, often manifest themselves prior to SCA as an indicator of the impending event. Unfortunately, today’s medicical technology requires patients to either spend an expensive and uncomfortable night in the hospital connected to an electrocardiograph (ECG), or wear a portable, but highly limited, Holter recorder. Both of these methods are limited in their ability to help doctors determine the severity of arrhythmias.

It is for this reason that NASA’s Glenn Research Center and Case Western Reserve University’s MetroHealth Hospital System partnered together to develop the Arrhythmia Monitoring System (AMS). The objective of AMS is to provide a system whereby SCA-susceptible patients may wear an ambulatory ECG monitoring device that streams the acquisition data to a central server through a cellular GSM/GPRS network connection, where it observable in real-time by cardiologists via a Web interface frontend. Furthermore, the ECG data is simultaneously archived to a database backend for detailed analysis by graphical interpretation and automated algorithmic detection techniques.

Cogent Software is proud to be involved with this project, providing both the Web interface frontend and the database archiving/algorithmic analysis backend portions. Utilizing a combination of GNU/Linux, PHP, MySQL, and PhysioNet’s PhysioToolkit analysis software for physiologic signal processing, a fully functional system was produced in a matter of months.