Team members:

• Naif Alajlan
• Nassim Ammour
• Salim Malek

Project Summary:
The need for developing health-monitoring systems for hospitals, clinical or home settings that can provide efficient services to the patient is becoming increasingly important in particular in medium and big urban agglomerations. The utilization of wired solutions in the aforementioned settings encumbers the mobility of patients and discourages medium and long term monitoring.

The progressive adoption of new paradigms in cardiovascular disease care, such as primary/secondary prevention and patient empowerment, promote the development of novel care approaches in which out-of-hospital monitoring and follow-up are basic aspects. In particular, the development and utilization of telecardiology systems that provide new modes of patient interactions with the health-care system is of increasing interest.

 

In this project, we propose to carry out an interdisciplinary research relying on information and communication technologies (ICT) to develop a smart, flexible, wearable and ambulatory system for remote monitoring of patients with cardiovascular diseases (CVD). For such purpose, this research project will exploit the expertises of researchers from diverse fields such as pattern recognition, intelligent systems, signal processing, wireless transmission, database management and biomedical engineering to give intelligent answers to the CVD monitoring issue. Different scenarios will be envisaged depending on the desired functionality.

In its basic from, the proposed system consists of a wearable ECG miniature sensor, which continuously measures the heart activity and wirelessly transfers the data directly to the mobile phone of the patient via Bluetooth connection. Then, the information is automatically transferred to the health care provider by using a mobile connection where it is automatically analyzed with advanced pattern recognition methods.

The importance of this research consists of reaching the following targets:

i) reinforce e-health care in Saudi Arabia;

ii) promote interdisciplinary ICT-based intelligent answers to medical issues;

iii) contribute to the biomedical research area in Saudi Arabia through the production of scientific publications and the dissemination of the achieved results in national/international conferences and workshops.

Project Objectives:

• Provide innovative and flexible wireless solutions for monitoring patients with cardiac diseases
• Develop efficient automatic methods for arrhythmia detection and classification
• Contribute to the biomedical research area in Saudi Arabia
• Promote e-health technologies in Saudi Arabia

 

 

Importance of the project:

 

CVD being the number one killer of the modern era, researchers over the world are providing advanced cardiovascular monitoring facilities to save life. The present project:

 

1.      Offers great opportunities to the modernization of the procedures of monitoring patients with CVD in Saudi Arabia. The findings could be extended to monitor other important vital physiological parameters such as blood pressure, temperature, EMG, and Phonocardiogram (PCG) signals.

2.      Provide an improved quality of life and medical services.

3.      Promoting the biomedical engineering area at both academic and research levels.     

4.      Consolidate Saudi academic and research know-how on the rapidly evolving biomedical knowledge edge.

 

Supporting goals:

 

The current research project supports the NPST main goals and objectives in the following 4 ways:

 

• Development of infrastructure for sustainable, cutting-edge and competitive research in the medical and health sciences. The digitalization of patients data and making available the ECG databases would allow the development of new procedures for automatic diagnosis.
• The research facilitates the performance of novel, competitively-funded and high quality research in the medical and health sciences. The successful  implementation of the ECG system would open the doors to other research issues such as the monitoring of other parameters (blood pressure, temperature, and EMG signals).
• Development and retention of national manpower and expertise in medical and health sciences research. The availability of this software will promote  the biomedical research area both at academic research and levels.
• Effective communication of research findings and significance of those findings to policy-makers and the public. The release of the new developments in the context of national and international conferences and workshops would increase the interest of policy makers and the public.

Project Progress:
 

Objectives	Phases	Tasks	Status(Completed, Modified*, Discontinued*)	Percentage of achievement
4	1	1.1	Completed	100%
		1.2	Completed	100%
		1.3	Completed	100%
		1.4	Completed	100%
		1.5	Completed	100%
		1.6	Completed	100%
		1.7	Completed	100%
2	2	2.1	Completed	100%
		2.2	Completed	100%
		2.3 (validation)	Completed	70%
		2.4 (dissemination)	Completed	100%
		2.6	Completed	100%
		2.7	Completed	100%
1 and 3	3	3.1	Completed	100%
		3.2 (dissemination)	Completed	80%
		3.3	Completed	100%
		3.4	Completed	100%
			Completed	100%
(*) Give details below if Modified or Discontinued. Where the objectives, phases, and tasks as outlined in the original proposal are as follows: Objectives:   1.     Provide innovative and flexible wireless solutions for monitoring patients with cardiac diseases 2.     Develop efficient automatic methods for arrhythmia detection and classification 3.     Contribute to the biomedical research area in Saudi Arabia 4.     Promote e-health technologies in Saudi Arabia   Phases: 1.     Data preparation  and Design phase 2.     System Implementation 3.     Testing and system refinement   Tasks: Task 1.1 Material purchasing Task 1.2 ECG data preparation Task 1.3 Update of the literature Task 1.4. wireless system Design Task 1.5. Method and Algorithm Design Task 1.6 Technical and coordination meeting   Task 1.7 Progress report writing   Task 2.1 Computer based method implementation Task 2.2 Wireless system implementation Task 2.3. System validation Task 2.4 Results dissemination Task 2.5 Technical and coordinating meeting Task 2.6 Progress report writing   Task 3.1 Software and system architecture refinement Task 3.2 Results dissemination Task 3.3 Technical and coordinating meeting Task 4.4 Final report writing

 

Project Contributions:
 

The contributions of the project can summarized as follows:

 

1.       Proved the feasibility of remote monitoring of multiple CVD patients.

2.       Developed a new smart system for the remote monitoring of patients with CVD, composed of three main units.

-        Patient unit composed of an ECG sensor with Bluetooth capability and a smart mobile phone. The developed mobile application allows the ECG signal acquisition and transmission.

-        Sever unit for storing ECG data coming from multiple patients.

-        Monitoring unit which provides a desktop GUI for the Doctor and a real time ECG analysis module which will help him to analyze ECG data of the monitored patients for arrhythmia detection.  A demo of the system can be viewed at: http://alisr.ksu.edu.sa/ECGmonitor.

 

3.       Developed a novel active learning method for arrhythmia detection and classification. This novel method allows expert interactions for efficient and fast analysis of ECG data in an offline mode.

4.       Trained  (2) undergrad students and supervised a B.Sc. project.

5.       Supervised a PhD student (undergoing).

6.       Publication of the results into conferences and ISI journals.

7.       Organization of a workshop. 

Project Outcomes:


Publications:
Accepted: 

1. N. Alajlan, Y. Bazi, F. Melgani, S. Malek, and M. A. Bencherif, "Detection of premature ventricular contraction in electrocardiogram signals with kernel methods ", Signal, image and Video Processing, 2012.
2. (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11760-012-0339-8#)
3. Y. Bazi, N. Alajlan, F. Melgani, H. AlHichri, and R.R. Yager, "robust estimation of warter chlorophyll concentrations with Gaussian process regression and IOWA aggregation operators," IEEE journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observation and Remote Sensing.
4. Y. Bazi, Naïf Alajlan, H. AlHichri, and Salim Malek, “domain adaptation methods for ECG classification ”, Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Medical Applications ICCMA-2013, Tunisia,, January 2013.
5. Y. Bazi, H. Hichri, N. Ajlan, and N. Ammour, "Premature ventricular contraction arrhythmia detection and classification with Gaussian process and S Transform," Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Communication Systems and Networks, CICSyN-2013, Spain, June 2013.

Under Review : 

1. Y. Bazi, N. Aajlan, S. Malek, H. Alhichri, F. Melgani, and N. Ammour, "A Wearable ECG System for Remote Monitoring of Multiple Patients with Cardiac Arrhythmias", IEEE Transcation on instrumentation and measurement.

Awards and Honors:

1.   Silver medal in The Malaysia tech Invention Expo (www.mte.com.my) Mar 2012
2.  Double Gold prize in The British Invention show (http://www.britishinventionshow.com/) Nov 2012

 

Software packages:
 

1.   ECG database collection
2.   1 Android phone app (in Objective C
3.   Monitoring unit for doctors (in C++)
4.   Server unit for ECG data storage (in C++)
5.   Module for ECG analysis : Interatctive ECG classification (in Matlab)

 

Contact Us For information about the project, contact: Advanced Lab for Intelligent Research (ALISR) 966-11-4696295 ybazi@ksu.edu.sa The mailing address for ALISR is: College of Computer and Information Sciences PO Box 51178 King Saud University  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia  11543