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Build Your Own ECG
Jason writes "I finally finished documenting my $4 home made electrocardiograph (heart monitor). If anyone is interested or wants to build one for themselves, please come by and take a look. Makes me wonder why medical care costs so much. :)"
...please come by and take a look.
Translation:
Please slashdot me and don't even peek... :-)
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
wxWindows has plotting functions, and is cross-platform and GPL. We don't need no stinking VB *shudder*. Less than 10$ in parts, but a hundred bucks in software?
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
This could make a great gnome toolbar applet. Then I could enjoy watching my heart race when I accidently type 'rm -rf *' in the wrong directory!
when you can tell me how to build one of 'dem four dollar defibrillators. With my steady diet of coffee, butter and bacon, heck, that thing would pay for itself.
And to think that today I used $4 to buy two Nacho Cheese Steak Chalupas at Taco Bell. While you were out trying to save your heart, I was slowly beating it into submission with slightly substandard but confusingly delicious Fast Food(TM).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I finally finished documenting my $4 home made electrocardiograph (heart monitor).
From the website:
Here you will find information how how to build one with less than $10 in parts.
Lies damned lies!
Bored with karma, be a fan/freak
Woo woo, sensors. You want to impress me (a USU grad)? Let's see your plans for a defibrillator using old lamps or a dialysis machine using a Fram oil filter.
Oh, and if you could come up with a website that can stand up to the first 5 minutes of a Slashdot posting that would be nice too.
His vital are dropping, maybe he should have looked into monitoring his school's server.
- clear -
Beep beep...beep beep...beep beep
-Mr. Fusion
Making your own antibiotics really isn't that difficult... maybe I should write up a how-to and submit it.
Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep... Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.......
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Yea, but does it interpret the data. That's one of the big expenses according to her: have the cardiologist examine the data and give his opinion. Since it's all waveform stuff, I wonder how much of that could be automated in the future?
This space for rent.
Please... I didn't spend four years at Evil Medical School to work free. Thankyouverymuch.
Also, can someone please kludge up a serial/usb/bluetooth/etc. link up for this thing? Maybe we can attach them to those computers in the Korean PC Bangs. They'll force people to log off Counterstrike before they play themselves to death.
/only half-serious.
I mean seriously, if you feel the need to build your own, is there something else wrong in your health? Mental perhaps? :D
Hopefully you won't need that in a real situation.
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
This site has been viewed: 541 times And it's already to a crawl...Slashdotting in 5, 4, 3...
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
I connected the ECG to the Utah server and it was beeping incessantly.
That means everything is working fine, right?
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
The proper acronym for one of these is an EKG
Anyknow know of schematics and software for EEG's?
It can't be much different from what's in the article.
Okay, when you get sick, you can use your $4 EKG machine. Heck, I'm sure there's a website that'll teach you how to remove your own appendix, gallbladder, or perform your very own vasectomy too. If you can do it, more power to you!
PLEASE be careful with ECG or EEG circuits, especially if you're planning to use an oscilliscope to see the wave or a data acquisition board to log the data. The pads and the gel used to adhere them to the skin and lower the resistance to get a good signal can sometimes cause current to flow into the body, especially if the circuit is not optoisolated.
Normally, the skin resistance is high enough to make the current flow negligible; however, when the pads are on, the resistance in the path is very low, and you could seriously injure or kill yourself if even a small amount of circuit flows 'back' through the electrodes.
Professional ECG machines usually have a lot of protection circuitry on their front ends (the instrumentation amplifiers) as well as between the amplifier and the ADC/output circuits to prevent this from happening. This is obviously even more critical in line- (i.e. 110V or 220V-) operated devices.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
I wouldn't mind that one. We could follow it with an article on how to amputate limbs with pocketknives.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Get some ice and a sharp knife...
please come by and take a look
/. effect!
Obviously someone who does not fully understand the
I stole this Sig
I have created a radiation therapy machine out of a broken microwave oven and some powertools. Why pay a bunch of money in a hospital? Want radiation therapy without the cost? Come over to my house to try it out... However, please don't set the timer for too long...
Jason Nguyen was today expelled from the University of Utah after his home web directory saw a 4,000,000% increade in traffic.
The reason medical care costs so much is because the principles of free market are applied to it. And I'm not talking about competition - which is great, I'm talking about option. Free market works well in the places where both the buyer and the seller actually have an option whether to complete the transaction or not. When that's not the case, it degenerates into "pay or die", which is clearly an exageration, but not very far from the current state of affairs.
The Raven
This guy has no freakin chest hair? wtf?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Oh don't get me started on medical equipment, [read: I'm going to get started on medical equipment]
Being disabled (SMA type 2, A type of MD, Donate to MDA!) I deal with medical equipment a lot, less then some in more critical situations, but more then your average user.
It's outrageous the markup medical tag gives to an item, one of the most outlandish of them that I saw was a flag, a metal mounting bracket, fyberglass rod, and cheap neon flag. You know the kind, sold in the walmart bike department for a measly 3$
Do you know how much they wanted at a medical store? No you dont.... 18$
So the price of "medical" is 15$ on top of 3$ It's insane.
You can buy an Ok car for the price of an electric wheelchair. And that's just for what's on the low end.
How exactly are people who can't walk suppossed to affoard this shit? Sure it's possible, and often times picked up by the government (thank god)
And if you're not covered, forget footing this bill your self, unless you've got cash to burn. And it's not like the freedom of mobility is important or any thing. Just one of life's liberties some people take for granted.
"I wish I could sit all day"
Fuck you buddy
Grrr, can you tell I'm bitter?
And then theres red tape. I've been using this same wheelchair for several years now, it needs replaced. But fighting for them is a nightmare. So much paper work.
Computational Madness in a round package.
Makes me wonder why medical care costs so much.
Damn near everything used in a hospital has to be certified to be used for medical purposes. People's lives are at stake, and you have to be sure that your device operates within tolerances, doesn't crash, doesn't electrocute people, etc. It costs money to think of every possible problem and design a device around that. Also, as other people have said, the people that run these things are some of the most educated people in the world. Try to start a hospital with your $4 device and let me know how it goes.
It's not impossible to kill yourself with a badly-designed ECG device.
Places like UL/CSA say that voltages under 40V or so are safe. But if you apply it to electrodes pasted to your chest, the unsafe voltage is WAY lower than 40V.
If you build a simple ECG and connect it to a computer, that computer had better be battery-powered. If not, then you might get a nasty surprise (waking up in the afterlife of your choice.)
((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))
SCIENCE HOBBYIST amasci.com
I'll have to build one :) Thanks for sharing. Might even try a serial interface eventually. Hmm.
Next up, a pulse ox monitor.
Congrats on what you've done so far...if you want to take the next step:
Higher-quality ECGs systems don't use generic op-amps, they use special devices called instrumentation amplifiers that are able to reject common-mode signals at the inputs really well. Turns out then when you place electrodes on the skin, the skin between the electrodes acts like a crude battery (we're full of electrolyte after all!) and you get a large, shifting potential difference between the two electrodes that can drown out the millivolt-range ECG signal.
Oh and by the way, the electrodes and wires will make great radio antennas (esp for 60 hz noise)! Check out the AD624AD instrumentation amp from Analog Devices.
The ECG measurement is a key piece of the standard polygraph. One of these can be combined with a galvanometer (easy), a skin thermometer (easy), and possibly a respiratory rate measurement (harder: standard technique is to wrap the chest with a stress-sensitive band and build a circuit similar to the ECG one) for a lie detector that should be great fun at parties.
A disgustingly large amount of our medical expenses goes to malpractice insurance, and mostly to protect from one of the millions of malpractice cases that never should have been that occur each year. Granted, the ability to sue for malpratice *is* a good thing. However, it is grossly misused, and results in higher medical bills for all.
Not to say that's the only factor... but that's one of them.
---^v---^v---^v-------
Eeep...eep...eep..eeeeeeeeeeee
time of death 927PM CST.
Damnit jim I'm a doctor not a webserver admin..
Partnership for an idiot free America!
Overhead, Malpractice insurance, and legal fees.
looks like his server's monitor is flatlined :)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
EXACTLY! Just what I was thinking when I saw this.
.1 amp to kill you dead, and about .01 amp can interfere with normal heart operation. Normally, skin runs about 10 to 100 kohms resistance - to get 10 milliamps you would need about 100 to 1000 volts delivered across the chest.
Kids, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
Real medical gear has full galvanic isolation - that means there is NO current path that goes from the patient's body to the equipment - the signals pass through either an isolation transformer, an optocoupler, or a capacitive coupling. That way, any ground leakage in the equipment won't fry the user.
It takes about
When you put the gel on, you reduce the resistance to a few hundred ohms. Now you need only a volt.
Normal consumer equipment can have "leakage currents" - places current shouldn't be flowing but is. You hook your home-brew circuit up to the printer port on your PC, and maybe you are OK. Then one day, while screwing around with it, a cap starts to fizzle in your power supply, or maybe you reach up to adjust your monitor, or maybe you put your foot on the ventilation register. Then you get to start (posthumously) on the 6 o'clock news.
At a MINIMUM, you should power the circuit with a nine volt battery, and communicate with the PC via an opto-isolated RS-232 link.
Even better, splurge and get the real medical isolation amplifier modules. Yes, they will cost a bit more than US$4, but then, if that is all the value you place on your life....
On second thought - go for it! And make sure you clip the ground lead off your computer's power cord while you are at it. And do it in the bathtub - that will help shield the fnord rays out.
www.eFax.com are spammers
fuckin waste of time - go get a life.. beeeeeeeeeeeeepppeppepepeppepepeppepeppepepepe...
I've got karma to spare, so I'm gonna say it.
I don't know which I consider to be more ignorant...a person who submits his website to Slashdot without making sure his server can take the hits, or the Slashdot person who approves an item for posting without bothering to make sure the server can take the hits.
Next time instead of spending a few dollars on some circuit, spend a few more dollars on more reliable web service.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Free. Market.
Why the hell should they let you afford to keep your house after they save your life? What are you going to do? "Chemo? Oh, no thank you, I'll just go home and die." Ha! United Healthcare's gonna take you and everyone that doesn't want you to die to the cleaners the first chance they get! Boycott, if you can, but they've got the only biological imperative more persuasive than sex on their side! Face it, little man, until you're ready to go crawling back to Hilary Clinton and her "better idea", you better be ready to put up with pharmacutical companies that value Viagra over cancer cures, scale their pricing to insurance+your bank account, and steal from their customers and investors at the same time!
Yeah, I recently talked to my HMO's "customer service contractor" on the phone for 3 FUCKING HOURS, can you tell? They don't even let you talk to their own fucking company? They have to hire ANOTHER company to keep them from having to hear my screams of anguish? Fuck, even the checks get sent to an independent contractor, how do I even know if these mythical "UHC" people even exist? For all I know, my money could just be going to some Frenchman at a resort in Bermuda. Shit, I could probably get some Sicillians to rough up the doctors until they treat me for half as much.
Welcome to my web page on how to make a simple ECG (electrocardiograph - also known as an EKG). Here you will find information how how to build one with less than $10 in parts. But before we get started, let's take a moment to talk about shop safety. Be sure to read, understand, and follow all of the safety rules that come with your power tools. Knowing how ....ummmmm,
sorry. I guess I got into a little New
Yankee Workshop moment there. :) Anyways, I do want to talk
about safety. This device requires you to strap electrodes across your
chest. This is inherently dangerous.
Both because of the pain caused by sticky tape pulling hairs out of a person's
body and also because even
small currents can kill. Do not attempt this experiment if you are not
comfortable around electrical devices. I am not responsible for any harm
you may cause yourself. I have done everything I can think of to make this
safe, but don't come crying to me if you find yourself dead.
Now that I've started with this positive note, I can begin. I've split my web page into two sections. One for the impatient - who would like to make their own NOW. And the other for people who would like a little commentary from me. Oh, and those of you who just want to see the final product and don't care about the details, just skip to the Results. Happy reading!
Quick Details on building your own ECG
In Depth Information about my ECG
Introduction - What is an ECG? History behind it. What was I thinking?!
Some Stuff Sought Out - Miscellaneous things that I needed but didn't have
Adventures in Analog Land - The primary amplification circuit - all good ol' analog
Plenty of Programming - The visual basic source
Results - Maybe it's not perfect, but I think it's COOL!
Future thoughts - I still think I'm perfect, but I'm ready to argue these specifics
Notes - I didn't make this all up. Here's proof!
Not bad for about two weeks of work, eh? If any of you have any comments, questions, insults, etc; please email me. Thanks for coming.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
I managed to grab that before the site was /.ed, there's also a pic of a windows app running on his desktop, so obviously he;s not counting the cost of his puter in the estimate :)
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
There are several reasons healthcare is so expensive.
1. Litigation. Does the phrase "malpractice insurance crisis" ring a bell?
2. A side effect of (1.) is something called "CYA medicine". Ever receive a chest CT because your heartburn just might be a pulmonary embolism? It happened to me just recently.
3. Failed accountability. This one takes a bit more explaining. Ever bother to look at your bill? Of course not. Why? Because chances are, the insurance company pays it. Aha! You say. What if I'm not insured? Well then, many people who aren't insured "spend down" and go on Medicaid. Once more, nobody looks at what Medicaid is being billed, except for the hardworking beurocrats (cough)bull***(cough). Only the very narrow slice of the population that is "self paying" actually looks at a bill (more on thatlater) You would think that insurance companies would be on guard for their bottom line, but corporate inefficiency is often no better than government inefficiency.
4. Complex and inefficient billing. Health care is one of the few businesses where you receive service at a single location, yet billing goes from subconractors directly to insurance companies or patients. Worse yet, billing from some contractors takes weeks, or even months. Yuck! Imagine if every business worked like this. Imagine getting your car fixed, and you get bills from the mechanic, the parts department, and the oil supplier spread out over 2 months. It's not just inconvenient. It actually hinders your ability to make financial plans because you don't know what's coming. And why don't you know what's coming? That leads us to...
5. ...Secrecy. That's right. Secrecy. Try to call up a hospital and ask them for their price list. Chances are, you'll get the same answer I got: "That's on a computer and it's confidential". I was transferred to a manager who had her phone on voicemail. In retrospect, I should have known I was in trouble when the phone tree had "press 2 if you're an attorney". This is probably one of the biggest reasons healthcare costs too much. Sure, there are several hospitals within driving distance, but if I think I am going to need an exam that is likely to involve half an hour with a doctor, some medication, and an x-ray... I have no idea who charges the least for an x-ray, or what the hourly billing rate is for a doctor, or what the average examining time is for diagnosing a condtion. We have more accountability at the garage than we do at the hospital (Chilton's guides, posted labor rates, etc).This alone is probably the single biggest factor driving up healthcare costs. Lack of pricing information makes comparison impossible, resulting in a virtual monopoly even though there are multiple companies. So, what did I do? I gave up and paid a price that I could not verify as accurate because I knew that the only way to get the price list was to make a federal case out of it, and spend 100 times more in legal fees than my bill was.
6. Vested interests. You can call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but I think various interests want the price of healthcare to skyrocket so that they can use that as an excuse to socialize it. The corporations actually secretly like the idea of socialized medecine, because then they get to become government agencies. If you are a corporate sleazeball, the next step up is to become a government sleazeball; the perks are just that much better. You can just hear them salivating.
Want to fix healthcare? Fine. Require providers to give one bill in a timely manner--no pass-throughs to subcontractors. Require providers to post price-lists online if they have a website, or to make price-lists available to the local libraries. Require employers who insure their employees to provider high deductable insurance. There should be no claims or forms until annual out-of-pocket costs exceed 10% of your annual pay. Place a cap punitive damages, as many have suggested.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Well, issues of "medical care" and "medical equipment" costs being two rather separate things(one of the biggest costs in medical care is liability insurance, probably followed by administrative overhead)...
...it might be because the expensive REAL version won't kill you when there's a lightning strike nearby, or when someone touches the case after building up a static charge, or something shorts out in the computer half...the list goes on. It only takes a few microamps to stop your heart- it's all in the path the current takes. Having those nice electrodes in the right places, making great electrical conduct with your skin...well, umm...you should get the picture.
Medical equipment is designed to be 'bulletproof' in almost every way- there's a standard, for example, for medical-rated Edison plugs and sockets.(Edison plug = US electrical plug). It's VERY heavy duty, makes really good contact, has excellent stress relief on the cord, etc...because something VERY important might be using it, like an artificial heart pump in an operating room, or a dosage machine for an IV, or a ventilator. The REAL version also can't crash or stop working- so, for example, if it has a computer, the instruction code, the chips...everything is heavily tested. Jokes aside, the Pentium math dividing bug is a perfect example of why you can't just use "anything" for medical equipment. What if that bug caused the heart monitor to display the wrong heart beat rate? Electronics used for medical equipment get a LOT more testing- lives are at stake. Same idea behind the MIL specs, although with MILSPEC stuff, the idea is more that the military really abuses the crap out of stuff ON TOP of similar concerns as medical stuff.
All of the above are why you often see these days disclaimers from chip makers that say "this device is not certified for use in life support equipment" and such. The statement often extends to industrial automation- "situations where malfunction may result in injury or death", stuff like that. Ie, "don't use this where if it screws up, it dumps 10 tons of molten steel on a bunch of steel workers' heads."
Please help metamoderate.
That's the sound of yet another web server flatlining.
BTW the only lame thing around here is your bloody "lameness" filters! How in hell else can I simulate a flatline in text without using repetition?
You're using her as bait, Master!
Healthcare is so expensive because of...
*gasp*
LAWYERS! Here in PennSUElvania, doctors are fleeing to other states in droves because malpractice insurance can cost 50% of a doctors GROSS revenue.
Another poster also mentioned CYA medicine - and I wholly agree. I went in with persistent heartburn (from persistent overeating - and I told him that I have a problem dealing with food control), and the doctor ended up shoving me into a $2300 echocardiogram, a $1300 thoracic endoscopy, and, of course, shoved my pockets full of little purple pills, an AstraZeneca notepad, a bunch of Purple Pens, a purple calculator, and all kinda other promotional big-pharma items. Oh yeah, and let's not forget the $70 office visit.
So, rather than send me to a therapist to help deal with my binge eating disorder (cost to insurance company: $800 for 8 visits), he did all these tests and didn't solve the problem... and cost my insurance company almost 5 times as much money..
I have no more faith in doctors.. They're not allowed to be doctors any more out of fear of lawyers...
Can someone easily turn a completely unrelated discussion into a GPL vs. Microsoft flamewar.
I can tell you that many of us clinicians laugh out loud at some of the machine "interpretations" that ECG machines generate.
NEVER trust a physician who allows his ECG machine to interpret your tracing... run for the door... I'm quite serious about that. If the guy doesn't have the expertise to read your tracing himself, don't trust your cardiovascular health to him.
I've sent people home with ECGs that read ****ACUTE MI***** in large, upper-case font on the top, because the machine was totally, completely wrong. The only thing it's sometimes useful for is in reading QT intervals, and occasionally rate (though the machine can be easily fooled on this one as well).
Have a doc read it, preferably a cardiologist. Of course, if you don't want to pay a guy like that for his expertise you don't have to... but you get what you pay for.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
If you can, please mirror my mirror. I'm sure a large number of slashdot readers have servers available they can put to good use.
More leads would make this project more useful. Besides rate and rhythm, a real ECG machine is used to measure axis. Axis refers to the direction in which the heart depolarizes and repolarizes. Current ECG machines do rate, rhythm and axis computations automatically, but doctors are often suspicious of their findings. I think there is significant work left to make a more accurate and intelligent ECG.
While he was researching his device, he should have looked a little harder at Einthovens work, and he would have seen where to actually place his electrodes (to get the tracing we all know, lead I). The way he has them in the photo explains the reason for his "negative deflection" They are in a place that looks at the Left anterior portion of the heart. Roughly V4 in medical parlance. This is an area where you want R wave progression, which is some of what he was seeing. I am sure some of it is his device, but most of the negativity is from that source I bet. In otherwords, normal.
Nice job, but I wouldn't let it touch me.
You can get a safe (no pennies attached to a wire) useful (no need to attach yourself to big devices) heart rate monitor like Polar for 70$ so why would you want an EKG setup?
Back in the day (several old geezers I know have told me stories and they are all similar in this respect), if you had to have surgery done or whatever, you could "do business" with the doctor (bargain on price). Once the price was agreed, the service was carried out and you paid the doctor. That was simple. Then, a bunch of liberals came along and said, "Wait a minute. Some people can't afford health care! Let's make it so that everybody can get healthcare, regardless of ability to pay." It sounds like a good idea, right? Sure it does! But it's a pie-in-the-sky. The minute government got involved, everything got expensive. All of a sudden, there are a million billion forms to fill out, all kinds of procedures to go through, etc. The accounting and paperwork became so expensive for doctors that prices had to become sky-high. Suddenly, doctors were spending more time doing this petty crap than helping patients who need help. (In fact, as recently as two weeks ago, a doctor friend of mine told me that now, because of even MORE laws, he has to fill out an ADDITIONAL packet of 25 or so pages for EACH patient. How do you expect prices NOT to be so high?)
Since health care became so expensive, all kinds of insurance companies saw an opportunity to scam people out of good money. They scam you and they scam the doctors. Health insurance became a necessity due to high prices. So now, you pay your insurance company all the time, and if you need to have something done, you pay a deductable and they pay 10% or so of what's left. For example, someone I know had a cat scan at one time because of a mysterious problem he had. He received a bill for $3,000.00, which his insurance was taking care of. According to an insurance statement that he showed me, the insurance company paid $300.00 to the hospital, and that was the entire payment. In other words, 10% of the amount. But it gets better. Another doctor I know told me that because the insurance only pays about 10%, he and every other doctor/clinic/hospital multiplies the price by 10, so that when they get paid 10% by the insurance, they get what they should actually be charging. So now, if you DON'T have insurance, you probably can't afford ANY health care, because for YOU, the prices are ten times as much. So insurance became nearly mandatory for anyone who isn't a millionaire.
That's why health care is expensive. To recap: Government intervention made everything extremely expensive. Insurance companies caused prices to multiply by ten beyond the government-created prices. That is why I am against any sort of government meddling in health care. Let the doctors do what they need to do without all these damn forms and the bullshit. People should pay the doctor directly. If you can't afford to pay the doctor, go to a free clinic or send the bill to a nonprofit organization that pays for people like that through donations. They make the money through marketing. There are millions of people who will see commercials of sick kids and immediately call with their credit card ready. And it'll be tax deductable anyway. This way, the problem is solved. No more paying hundreds in insurance ALL THE TIME when you'll just pay a hundred or so IF SOMETHING HAPPENS. If you get seriously sick, well, the money you saved over your lifetime (if the government would stop taking it all away to fund a healthcare system that costs 1000000 times as much as it should) will pay for that and leave a pretty chunk of change for the kids to inherit after you croak. It's as simple as that. Want insurance? Then get insurance. But don't make 95% of the people suffer through this horrendous shit because 5% of the people (of which maybe 0.1% or less are actually sick) can't afford to pay a damn doctor. Besides, doctors are people, too, and if someone is sick, they'll probably help them out.
I am a third year medical student at a state medical school in the United States
This is a multifactoral problem. The average medical student graduates with about $180,000 debt (closer to $220,000 by the time it's paid off). Monthly payments can be about $1,000 per month.
Secondly, technology has largely supplanted physical diagnosis. Doctors have gotten sloppy in the past due to reliance on expensive diagnostic tests rather than relying on patient's history and their 5 senses (Greeks used to taste urine to diagnose diabetes). This problem is being addressed. Medical students are trained more like engineers in that cost to the patient (and by extension the system as a whole) is an important consideration in ordering tests. Of course, the health of the patient is paramount. For example, a good abdominal exam can obviate the need for an expensive CT scan.
The legal system in the US contributes in no small way to the cost of health care. Professional liabilty insurance ("malpractice insurance" to the laypublic) premiums can range upwards of $100,000 per year for high-risk specialty. An OB/GYN I know in Florida was recently offered $250,000 of coverage at a $216,000 premium. He is now practicing without coverage. Doctors pass these increased costs onto patients.
Lastly, medical equipment is held to tremendously high quality control standards. From my software engineering classes, I seem to recall that the importance of reliability testing was consistently invoked by mentioning areospace and healthcare equipment. If your $4 EKG misses one MI, you've got a big assed lawsuit on your hands (which we all pay for through increased costs).
My $0.02
--b
I keep on reading all these posts saying that medical gear is more expensive because it has to be FDA approved . Well in Canada (the frozen land to the north of america) you have to be health canada aproved . This approval costs $200 up , if you dont claim your product conforms to any standards its pretty much ruber stamping (yet we still have the same huge markup) . Makes on think about the posible business ideas (until one thinks of the lawsuits).
I don't know what everyone's one about. I just built one of these. I'm monitoring my heart rate in a window right now and it works gr9'0wrtup
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
From the article:
"but don't come crying to me if you find yourself dead."
You also see dead people?
Operating on yourself, a la Homer Simpson?
His design uses Op-Amps to isolate the body from any voltage going across the soundcard ports. Shouldn't this keep you relatively safe?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. Get the following parts - Two (2) all metal irons from the olden days. Steal them from your grandparents house, cost free. One (1) extension cord, steal it from an apartment block if you live up north, if not walmart 99 cents. One (1) pair of rubber gloves.
2. Cut off the end of the extension cord that does not plug into the wall, then spice it about a foot in length. Remove the plastic casing from about 3/4 of the length you spliced. Coil one end of the exposed cable around the handle of one the irons. Take the other and do the same with the other iron.
3. Put on rubber gloves, plug in the extension cord and wait for the heart attack you fat bastard.
*I take no responsibility in any of this information, for educational purposes only.
Because of the FDA approval required, which will set you back hundreds of millions of dollars.
There was something like this in Scientific American a while ago, only it used an instrumentation amplifier instead of an op-amp, which would reduce common mode interference and give you a cleaner signal. Analog Devices makes a cheap one, AD620 which sells for around $5 and wouldn't raise the cost of the project too much. They also make an expensive one, AD624AD, around $20 with better gain and better common mode rejection, still not outrageously expensive. some diodes to give some protection against getting electrocuted by a power surge might be a good idea too, for those girly men who can't handle their electricity. you can buy real ekg electrodes cheap too. Of course, you'll blow your entire budget hiring a cardiologist to interpret the results.
I have always said that if engineering were practiced like medicine is practiced by doctors, people would be dead. Gone due to a bridge or building falling down, or electrocution, or a chemical plant exploding because they rely on what they've seen before rather than what the problem might really be.
Real engineers are thorough thinkers. That is the most fundamental skill one is supposed to learn in engineering. Engineers should think about what the real root cause of the problem is and every possible answer to the problem. While cost is a consideration, an engineer will tell it like it is and tell you that you have to choose between something that works and something that costs what you want it to cost.
Doctors, on the other hand...well, I've gone to doctors telling them that I can't sleep and the first thing they do is want to pump me full of Xanax. They never asked me if there was something wrong going on personally in my life, or if I'm consuming too much caffeine or MSG, or anything. Just wanted to prescribe crap and get me out of their office. Fortunately, I told the doctor I wasn't taking Xanax and promptly found another doctor who sorted it out (too much caffeine). These are the same idiots who prescribe Ritalin to kids who won't behave in class because their parents are too busy stuffing them full of sodas.
But that's my point. As an engineer, it's my job both to identify the root cause of the problem and investigate the most feasible solution. I will never sign off on an engineering document if I feel someone will be in danger, including my reputation. Piss-poor engineers (and, unfortunately, your average doctor) will let it go through. So please, don't make that comparison, because it's patently ridiculous.
then for capital punishment why bother with an electric chair with hundreds of volts and significant amerage? Why not just use a 12-volt car battery and a little gel? A Die-Hard perhaps?
Finally a slashdot story that counteracts the slashdot effect. Of course the readers may be dead on the floor, but at least everyone will get to read the article...
the high price is due to liability....personally i like the idea of sueing bad doctors but the problem is that the cost is spread out to all doctors good or bad...a good idea would be to create a list of bad doctors that anyone can look at. Like i don't know on the web??? just a crazy idea. Then the insurance companies could focus on them paying more for liability instead of everyone else. Of course no one likes this idea. Instead of going after the bad doctors the industry (insurance and medical) go after the people sueing making laws limiting your right to sue if they fuck up.
Scientific American published such a circuit in their Amateur scientist area a few years ago... link to article .
It is a commonly referenced site.
Pffff, who needs antibiotics, when you can make your own colloidal silver generator.
I realized CYA means "Cover Your Ass." Not too hard.
A CD from iTunes: $10 A Song from iTunes: $0.99 Not paying a cent to Microsoft: Priceless
I'm going to spring for the $30 ECG.
I learned my lesson with the $4 dentistry set, and even worse, the $4 electroshock therapy machine.
I STILL can't quite get my hair to stop standing on end. I can't even wear hats - hair pokes through like skewers through butter (which, incidentally, is one of the only things I can eat now thanks to the dentistry set).
I thank the lord I didn't invest in the $4 eye-surgery kit.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
"The man was a damn genius."
Yes the man was very succulent.
It could suck in your farts seperate out the methane, reformulate it and power a hydrogen fuel cell for electricity for you ekg. simple!
Hook it up to an expert system and do the same to all the other monitoring equipment you built in the Junkyard Wars stadium and have them all talk together with some sort of secure wireless protocol. Put it all together and you'd probably get as good an idea of what's going on as your average medical technician. The trick is then finding some way to remove that hunk'o'pot roast from your chest and replace it with another one for less than a couple hundred grand.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Speaking of medical safety...did anyone notice that this device is running under Windows? I don't know about you, but I'd never hook anything running Windows up to my body.
IAAL
How to save money by performing your own circumcision!
hook it up to a drummer on stage while projecting his readout behind him. Aside from the potential of death this would be pretty cool. Maybe Spinal Tap could run some trials?
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
when slashdot posts a story about something one is very familiar with, you really get to see what a bunch of liars are make posts.
The amount of people claiming to know this stuff that are absolutly wrong in there posts mean, they are liars, OR there going to kill someone with there incompetence.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The cost of the computer and MS Windows is not included. I would be more impressed if he could make a $204 + (local tax on $200) one with that Walmart computer.
mod up parent please
He doesn't like liberals.
I think you know the answer:
Anyways, I do want to talk about safety. This device requires you to strap electrodes across your chest. This is inherently dangerous. ... even small currents can kill.
Medical care costs so much because the difference between 95% safe and 99.9% safe is expensive.
Anti-semetic stereotype, or pee-pee humor? Discuss!
Liberals fuck up everything they touch, like medicine and gun control. Liberals: "Let's ban these guns that look mean, and while we're at it, let's add 25 pages/patient to the already massive amount of paperwork doctors have to do.
A few prominent republicans have recently chosen to ban the mean-looking guns. Guess who. Hint: His father did the same thing when he was president too.
Oh yeah! You're American! No free medicare for JOO!
...
Ok now, all together now:
Oh Canada!
what do you expect? I think there is a reason that the "slashdot effect" has become infamous, even starring in a short story i read a while back.
I'd just like to point out that medicine is *already* socialized.
... the cost of healthcare skyrockets, 15% per year more than other costs.
My late grandfather, Joseph F. Rudmin, was the first doctor in NY state to immunize all the kids in his district. But while he was county health commissioner, despite laws that said that only AMA members could hold government positions, he resigned the AMA.
He did this, because the AMA was using his dues to lobby for laws that would reduce the number of doctors, in order to raise doctors' wages. In the end, the state AMA made him an honorary member, rather than allow a stink to be made.
But they succeeded with their goals, and the number of doctors is held artificially low. So their wages are high. So the lawyers gather, because birds gather for free seed, and lawyers gather for free money. And the insurance companies step in, and...
But medicine is already socialized. If a doctor comes in from India, or another country, he can't just set up a practice. Nor can you just say "give me the medical tests, I'll pass them, the way reading lawyers can get their degree." Nor can you just go to another country to get a medical degree. It has to be an approved school, and so on and so forth.
In a related issue, my own town's hospital was one of the first in the state to build a cancer center. A nice little wing, built not too long after it had built a few other wings. Then they expanded it. Then they built a maternity wing.
Then I noticed a cancer center going up in Charlottesville. Then in Norfolk. Then I noticed cancer centers going up where there was no hospital (Waynesboro).
It's clear that the nation's health care system has metastacized!
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You're kidding about the colloidal silver stuff right? This stuff is useless, possibly dangerous. Check this out
"It's not to say that I don't read the machine's interpretation... I do, but I subordinate it to my own clinical interpretation. To be fair, I have the luxury of knowing the history... something the machine may never know, and as any physician will tell you, history makes the diagnosis 80% of the time; the tests are simply to confirm what you suspected all along.
Maybe if you frame it like that, EKG machine reads don't really need to be perfect... they are, after all, just an adjunct... A human still makes the decisions."
Holistic AI.
Anyone willing to strap electrodes to their chest and try this is about 2 steps from being the winner of this years Darwin Award!
I can't believe this was even admitted..
Hmmm, you should know, as someone who deals with electronics, that obtaining a 'square' wave with the hand is pretty much impossible. There issue at hand is your circuit's impedence. The circuit has self induction, and no matter how cleanly you disconnect the wire, you will get a power spike. Now, on the other hand, if you were to have some sort of electronic gate (such as a transistor) doing the cutting for you, you would still have to 'establish' the current (which will behave like an exponential function - which is actually exactly what we see in the uncorrected black line here.)
Now, I don't know exactly what you were talking about when you mentionned the negative power spike in your EKG reading... but I can tell you the filters you applied were not at all doing what you thought they would be doing. You weren't producing a square signal to begin with... so it's not like your corrections brought you back to the orginal source... it's more like they brought you were you wanted to be.
You really need a wave generator to be able to do square waves... they are theoretically impossible to achieve, and in practice are damn friggin hard. the hand is definitely not good enough =)
Goes to show you how easy it is to forge science results even with the purest of intentions...
One of my undergrad bioengineering advisors told about the droves of electrical engineering undergrads that came to him year after year. The students thought intro circuit design was all they needed to build competent medical equipment, yet they had never even heard of isolation. I just thought it was funny that they probably did zero research and kept re-inventing the wheel.
With the republican control of the U.S. senate and house Carl Rove doesn't think it has a rats ass of passing again. Well Carl Rove will be wrong and I am already pissed about it. Guess what I am a one issue voter. Any gun good enough for the "goverment" to be able to own ought to be available to me.
Fuck Bush and fuck all the gutless liberal democrats who are running for president. Oh yea Fuck Carl Rove. I helped elect Bush I'll help un-elect his worthless Texas ass. Oh yea "I'm the NRA"
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
"Warning to anyone who got here via Slashdot: Do NOT attempt to overclock your heart!"
I have to disagree with my colleague on the size of the malpractice problem, at least as far as my specialty is concerned.
The good doctor is quite right that happy patients don't sue... studies bear that out. This is good info, but only applicable if you have the ability to make them happy, and/or have a long-term relationship with them.
In my specialty of emergency medicine, this is a big problem... we get sued like nobody's business. We don't like it, but much of it is out of our control. Allow me to explain:
1. we take care of sick, sick, sick patients, and sometimes they die. Unrealistic expections about medical care fall squarely on us. We are often the first target of grief-turned-to-anger... there's a reason why I sometimes have big cops standing by when I notify family members of a death... I've had those situations turn ugly in a hurry, to the point where I had to flee.
2. We are pressed for time. I love to chat, but the MI in the next bed, and that incoming trauma on the helo, and that eclamptic mother of twins can't wait... gotta run. Patients perceive this as neglect, and I often don't have time to explain it to them. They leave with the erroneous conclusion that we don't give a shit, which couldn't be further from the truth. ERs are busy places, and statistically, we are getting busier every year. It's only going to get worse.
3. Nobody likes to wait. In the ER, sicker patients come first. Naturally, this annoys the patient who has been waiting for 4 hours in the lobby, some of whom think it's 1st come 1st served. I've had patients call 911 FROM THE WAITING ROOM, because they noticed that patients arriving by squad were brought back right away. I can't make this stuff up, folks.
4. Environment. ERs are the medicine of last resort for most people... almost nobody WANTS to come to the ER. I take care of corporate CEOS, college professors, regular joes, and society's dregs, all in the same room. Nobody likes to be sandwiched between a puking drunk and a meth user who's fighting with six cops... when they ask to be moved to another bed, I often cannot oblige in a full department. People resent it, and I don't blame them, but I also can't help them.
5. Relationships. Apart from "frequent fliers," I seldom see anyone more than once. Regardless of any "winning personality," making friends in that short amount of time, with someone in terrible pain, or a parent worried about their child, is pretty tough. My frequent fliers are often people you don't want to see again: Drug users shopping for party supplies, street people looking for a place to sleep, gangbangers... I'd love to help them, but that's not what the ER is for... and many of those folks have chronic problems/situations I'm not equipped to treat.
I also agree that honest mistakes should be held harmless... everyone makes them, and I've made my share and then some. Blatant malpractice, egregious breach of the standard of care, malice... those folks should never touch another patient.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Well, chances are if you can visit the site, you already have a computer. It's not like he used it up in order to display the results.
But I understand your point. A hospital wouldn't be able to dedicate the price of a $400 computer and monitor or a $200 pda just for displaying the ecg results.
Oh wait. I guess they wouldn't have to dedicate it if the computer is can handle any of the computing requirements. And they already spend much more than that on the medical industry made ecg machines.
How much is a dedicated ecg machine? I saw on http://www.numed.co.uk/prices.html that pda's with the attachment and the software cost upwards of $1350.
Still, I'd rather have a tricorder.
Makes me wonder why medical care costs so much.
Although I will agree that medical costs are high, it's not due to the costs of the parts used to build ECG machines. Geez!
You would trust your diagnosis to a $4 machine built by some hobbyist on the weekend? I sure as well wouldn't. But even if the parts for a real ECG cost $400, it still doesn't demonstrate why you can't buy one for $400. So let me explain why it costs so much more: the price of ECGs has nothing to do with the price of its parts. Price is subject to the buyer's and seller's wants. If the price is too low the seller won't sell. If it's too high the buyer won't buy. If you've just spent two years developing a new ECG machine involving the work of a couple dozen engineers, testers, clinicians and marketroids, and hammered it out in clinical trials, fenced with the FDA, and met all the spurious checkboxes of the bureaucracies, you want some return on your investement. If you manage to sell only 50,000 then $400 a pop isn't going to cut it! (do the math) On the other hand, if you're a hospital with an increasingly shrinking budget and overseen by a hospital board composed of well-meaning but ignorant politicians, then $40,000 isn't going to cut it either. So a price is eventually reached that is mutually acceptable. It's going to be a lot higher than the price *you* would have paid, but you're not a hospital.
Why don't you get any input into the price? After all, you're the patient, and thus indirectly the buyer. The reason is that you have absolved yourself of any buyer responsibilities by foisting them off on an insurance company. If everyone who had an ECG reading had to pay for them out of their own pockets, you damn well better believe the price will come down! One reason medical prices are high because people (you, your employer, etc) don't shop for medical prices, they shop for monthly payments to an insurance company instead.
But ignore what I just said. I'll tell you what the real price of ECGs is. Free. Zero dollars and zero cents. You see, when a company like Siemens, Philips or GE makes a sale to a hospital, they throw in the ECG (and lightbulbs) for free. I may still cost those companies $500 in parts and $5,000,000 in R&D, but they'll make it up on the MRI, CAT, and US. And of course, on the service plans.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
if someone will someday invent a terraherz(sp) reader that measures your heart rate purely by watching the beating rather than measuring the electrical pulses.
I know that the technology is getting better, and there is hope that it can use existing background terraherz radiation rather than generating more.
The article I read (in 2000 I believe) wrote about it possibly being the base for tricorder type technology.
In a few days please post the same project with a Palm as display and an optoisolated circuit.
I've search the threads, nobody as yet mentioned it: wouldn't it be nice to jog/run/roll and graph the ECG ? (Keep the handheld device taped aside so it doesn't jump with you)
Also record the ECG with it and see when there is a 'step-over':
| | | | |
___/|___/|____.___/|___/|___/|
' ' ' ' '
^- here!
It seems to happen to me sometimes - I guessed it with my pulse - and I'd like to make sure.
I've thought about an extra cheap encephalograph using some Crystal Semiconductor's 24-bit 4-channel ADC (Primarily used for thermocouples), PIC as interface and some LED to transmit data via IrDA channel that should give absolute insulation. The analog and digital parts should be powered from separate LiIon cells. The op-amps are not needed since the ADC is sensitive enough.
The project was a part of a "BrainMouse" and was abandoned since it's input speed is too low compared with any of special mice for disabled persons.
I'm a medical director for an EMS agency, so I know the difficulty in interpreting stuff coming from the field. Getting a really good tracing on your 12-lead in the back of a moving rig is a challenge, to be sure. Now, my medics are not doing thrombolytics in the field or anything like that... maybe someday.
It would be nice to know a little more about the innards of the stuff we use/buy, particularly from an objective measurement standpoint. I'd love to know where Dr. Ornato gets that kind of info... might make purchasing decisions much more objective. I'd rather have that to throw at the reps than the "oooo! look at the shiny brochure!" that they're hoping for...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Econ 101.
Inelastic pricing.
You pay whatever we ask, or you die, or lie there in pain and fear.
Oh, and we'll pretend we have these standards for quality of drugs and equipment and caregivers, but that's just to forestall liability. This stuff is just as crappy as the stuff you buy at Walgreens, and these people are just as incompetent as the people who work at Walgreens.
And half of it is padding and sandbagging because you're too ignorant to know that you don't use a rheostat in a colonoscopy.
And we have all the money now, so we own the votes we need to stop you whenever you try to change the system by changing the law.
Now. Back to the price.
As an ER doctor, I'd like to respond to the people that think that a $10 ECG machine shows how inefficient the medical profession is. It's comparable to making a voltmeter out of radio shack parts and bragging about it to an engineer. Yes, most present day ECG machines give a reading of the rhythm strip- however, they are constricted to very narrow parameters. Tests have been shown to demonstrate that the most accurate interpretation of results is the combination of the ECG machine's reading overread by a cardiologist. The computer's interpretration is valuable, but I often obtain an "abnormal" reading by the machine with normal ECG's. The programmer errs with caution with the machine and normal variants are often read as abnormal- no one wants to get sued. The most important thing to regard when obtaining an ECG is the history a patient gives to you. The most important information in determining serious consequences of a cardiac event are usually from a patients history: not one machine's reading. A "gold standard" is often hard to come by when interpreting an ECG. An MI (myocardial infarction) may be confirmed by cardiac enzymes (blood test,) but is only truly confirmed by changes in wall motion ( of the heart) after the event by an ultrasound. A specialty in cardiology is only obtained after a fellowship in cardiology (after 4 years of med school and 3 years of internal medicine.) I think its a neat project- just don't get too caught up in the results without seeing a physician.
Yes, it's true, and if you do enough searching from that link (you gotta go all the way down for your link) you'll find what happens if you're affected badly by colloidal silver: silver colored skin
Not only for a great article that can easily be appiled to a number of types of instrutmentions but for not whining about the Slashdot Effect and instead, going out and finding mirrors for your Good Stuff!
Bravo!
1. They can measure the distances and size of certain spikes and waves. This is very useful (the physician doesn't need to count all those little boxes and calculate the times and amplitudes) and most ECG machines do this very reliably.
BTW: A defilibrator needs this technique, too. When trying to do a cardioversion (re-set the atria during atrial fillibration), this should only be done in a special timewindow to avoid fillibrating the ventricles. Thus, a defi has to recognize the R-spike and be able to calculate the heartfrequency.
2. Interpreting the overall picture of the ECG. This is a tough one, but not only for machines. Traditional computer algorithms are not suited for this. Modern statistical methods or machine learning techniques that can do pattern recognition are better suited. Being right in 95% is a very excellent result. Normally, those techniques have an error of 20% or more.
An artificial neural network (one possible algorithm) works like your physician's mind. Only with the difference, that your physician might have forgotten some rare diseases. Therefore, machines are always superior to humans.
Todays key problem is to get all needed information into the machine. E.g., your ECG does not know whether your patient takes drugs, uses a pacemaker, or whether the surgeon is currently cutting with his electro cutter. That's IMHO the only reason why you should check an ECG.
BTW: My guess on the ECG presented on the site:
- Hypokalemia (this strange negative wave between T and U
- Hypertrohpy of the left atrium (double-spike P)
The cost of ECG machines run $10,000-$15,000 (US). One of the biggest reasons for these cost is not the actual hardware or software cost, but the liability involved of selling such an item.
NT
Now it is possible to collect your own spinal fluid, and even examine it yourself under a microscope at home. saving money as well as providing both education and entertainment. Additional money can be saved by using a drill bit in place of a large bore needle but this technique requires a little more cleanup afterwards.
The actual self puncture process can be difficult. It's much easier if you can find an assistant to help out. (We avoid the word friend, because anyone who would help you do this is not your friend.)
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
If you try this at home, please document your efforts at this site.
With no disrepect to the author, this kind of circuit has been discussed and printed in hobbyist magazines ever since I got into electronics over 20 years ago, and a good deal earlier, I imagine.
Next up - how I built my own CPU ?!
But seriously, we still need those people who are prepared to sometimes try things for themselves from first principles, rather than using all-packaged solutions.
The insights gained can be invaluable; the learning process and sense of achievement, gratifying.
FYI, you can find specifications of open EEG equipment at http://openeeg.sf.net/. I didn't actually try it out myself (yet), but it looks quite decent and they say it is working nicely According to the specs, they are using 9V battery source and the actual electrodes-related circuits are optoelectrically separated from the computer.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
Medical care is expensive because doctors need to go through so much expensive training and certification, and because there is so much liability associated with medical care and malpractice which necessitate a huge insurance expense.
If you want cheaper medical care, I recommend finding a doctor in Canada or Mexico, or anywhere in the third world.
Amazing magic tricks
Reliability costs.
Every component in the unit has to conform to medical standards for equipment, every program running has to be almost totally asured not to ever go wrong, and virtually every part of the system has to be totally reliable.
PC, 99% reliability, cheep
Server 99.999% reliability damn expensive
Medical equipment... carry puting on those 9's cos someones gonna die.
Medical equipment is expensive because it simply cannot fail. If an EKG hiccups or gets stuck in some embedded-software loop, the company is going to be SOL when hospitals find out and dump their products. How about a faulty defibrillator that only works 1/2 the time, or lifesign monitoring equipment that occasionally has to reboot.
Sure, go ahead and make a $10 EKG. But don't be so naive as to expect medical equipment in general to be low cost. It takes a lot of time and money to test out medical equipment, and they recoup those costs by raising the price.
When I did my ER rotation, the attending physicians taught me that if the EKG reads something as normal, there's a good chance it's probably normal, expecially if you have no clinical suspicion of an abnormality (this last phrase is key!) It's only when it reads something as abnormal that you definitely can't trust it. (And, plenty of times, especially because of being rushed or just simple incompetence, the leads will be placed suboptimally, or the patient will refuse to co-operate, causing a less than ideal tracing on which the machine will choke on and read as wildly abnormal, but the doc may actually still be able to read.)
But, you have to realize, no one ever orders an EKG alone in order to evaluate whether or not someone is OK and can go home. You still have to take a history and do a physical, at the very least. And in what circumstances are EKGs usually ordered? When the patient is having acute chest pain.
There are plenty of non-cardiac, possibly catastrophic reasons for acute chest pain: pulmonary embolism, esophageal rupture, pneumothorax, aortic dissection, cardiac tamponade, etc., etc. Chances are, you'll get a normal EKG in all of these, and in the cases where you might get abnormal EKG, the machine might not even catch it, much less make a diagnosis.
So it seems pretty unlikely that you can automate the process at all on the basis of a normal EKG or even normal monitor readings. That's why you need nurses to check patients every hour in the ICU even with all those monitors and even though the patients are all in plain sight. If machines still can't do OCR that well, how the hell can we expect them to recognize patterns of clinical presentation?
One word: regulation.
If you do try this at home, *please* be careful to put a *really good* surge protector between your computer hardware and yourself. One of the major flaws with this type of approach is that it does not provide ground isolation between the computer hardware and the human subject. If, God forbid, a power surge occurred somewhere in the system, it would be transmitted to the subject and result in electrocution. I work at a [url="http://www.biopac.com"]physiological research[/url] company, so have been made aware of the risks of interfacing humans with computers through direct monitoring electrodes. If research or medical equipment that is plugged into a power socket stands even a *remote* chance of being connected to a human subject, it must be appropriately designed to have an independent ground to avoid killing its subject in its worst case scenario. For animal subjects, the approach of this article is perfectly safe depending on whether one cares or not that there is a statistical risk of killing the animal. This argument applies for any medical equipment. Medical equipment design goes beyond accuracy or uptime...it's designed *ensure* that the person it's connected to cannot be killed by it. If you're attaching a wire onto your body that has even a remote chance of connecting to the power socket, beware.
" Makes me wonder why medical care costs so much. :)
A few people will complain about doctors charging/making so much money. It takes a minimum of 11 years of education past high school (where you are spending money rather than making it) to become a doctor. Obviously doctors aren't overpaid, because we have a glut of computer programmers and a shortage of doctors. Enginers (4 years post high-school) are typically making $100k/year by the time a doctor has just gotten a decent practice started at $150/year. The engineer is leagues ahead on the savings at this point and didn't have to spend a year cutting open dead bodies.
When you go to see a doctor, their salary makes up less than 25% of what you pay. There are tons of other things digging into your wallet:
1. Malpractice insurance. Every person or company that ever has anything to do with your treatment in the hospital bears a liability. All the way down to the company that services the elevators and makes the brakes on the ambulance. An ECG failure can result in death because nobody realized that a patient's heart stopped. A motorized wheelchair that breaks could leave you stranded in the middle of the road. A dirty room could give you a nasty infection.
The people in Nevada have been especially nasty to their Ob\Gyns with lawsuits and now even the most competent doctors are refusing to deliver babies. Stupid juries award multi-million dollar awards for stillborn babies. It used to be very common for the baby or even the mother to die in childbirth. Modern medicine is reducing that. But many people pay tens of thousands of dollars just to get pregnant, and then want compensation when it doesn't turn out ok.
Malpractice should be completely done away with, except in cases of criminal negligence. People should have to pay out of their own pockets for malpractice insurance (just like car insurance) on any procedure they have done. Any settlements against a doctor should be public record. If you think your baby-on-the-way is worth 5 million dollars, then get a policy for that amount. If you really think that your eyes are worth 10 million, then get a policy for that amount before getting LASIK surgery. There's an inherent risk to any medical procedure. Americans seem to think that seeing a doctor is like buying a VCR.
2. Health insurance packages breed an I-want-it-all mentality.
My family's current medical coverage is 100% free as long as I get treatment at the local (largest in the state) hospital. I don't pay a penny for prescriptions. I got LASIK surgery for free. I've been to the emergency room twice in 3 years and didn't even have to pay for parking. Needed an MRI, took the CT too. I used a medication that costs twice as much as the default one just because I didn't want to remember to take it twice a day. Other people on the same plan go through $20-50k trying to concieve a baby via artificial insemination or in-vitro. Then the delivery is free (another $10k min). Viagra is free to the old folks. Women depressed about their small breasts get free boob-jobs. Free organ transplants up to $100k. 'Free' is the new codeword for 'everyone pays for it'. Socialism.
3. People think that HMOs and medicaid qualify as medical insurance. They will keep you alive, but not healthy.
4. Cheap/poor people abuse medicaid for free medical care. Developing asthma? Wait until after clinic hours and go to the emergency room. State owned hospitals cannot refuse you, and they can't effectively bill you either. Some people bring their accutely sick children to the emergency room with fake problems to get them admitted overnight rather than paying for a babysitter who knows how to take care of them. $1000 of tax money down the hole so the parents can go see a movie.
5. No-shows for appointments. People who don't pay for their own health care are least likely to show up for it. Clinical doctors alone bill at $400-800/hour. If someone doesn'
For about a buck you could get a surplus scalpel, and fix that heart right up.
Theres nothing really stopping someone from being their own doctor. You have plenty of sights online that cover actual pre-med and medical school training. And you can also get vetrinary supplies at any farm store. And plenty of cast off medical gadgets at surplus/junk auctions are available to be cleaned up,and repaired. Ya want low costs, there ya go. Ya want to be sure that you'll never have something bad happen ? haha, unlikely. Even with the incessant whining of the neurotic mommies of the world for a more and more well padded rubber room society, people will still die for no good reason randomly.
The reason for that is simply that there are a lot of mouths to feed. Err. Pay. There's all the nurses, orderlies, and paid peons to support, whose purpose is to make your normally wreched hospital visit somehow bearable.
You know, one could do a lot with a fully automated hospital, controlled by a few technicians and a team of MDs...
Of course, Hospitals are job centers, so that will probably never happen.
So what if you might kill yourself with this kit. This is a project that involves electricity AND lotion. Not a bad feat if you ask me.
Casca
one of these -
Ossatron
so that I can use it on my hip.
Osteonecrosis is a bitch; so's the FDA.
I took too much of that once, and have felt blue ever since. ;)
Blue? Yeah I felt kinda of blue, sort of got into a reflective kind of mood, but still, at least I've got my own external/internal mirror now.
This post doesn't even deserve to be on slashdot.. Any introductionary class in electrical engineering that involves a lab will do this... This is like the equivelent of making a poatato clock.... It's not especially cool.. The only intresting part may be the use of a computer to output the opamp singal, but we've seen this thousands of times, and there is plenty of commercially avaible (and I'm sure some GPL'ed) software to take in the signal. Then again if you have any type of profeciency in building circuits and such you probably have an oscilliscope laying around.
h ttp://www.ntu.edu.sg/terp/eee-project.htm/ www.ee.upenn.edu/rca/software/Labview/Cardi acvi/cardiacvi.html
this has been done over and over again though:
http://www.picotech.com/applications/ecg.html
http:/
blah blah, do your own search on google.
Your mammas flamebait.
Several hospitals in the Columbus, Ohio area will be using PCs with barcode scanners to handle medications (scan the patient, scan the nurse, scan the meds, get the go-ahead from the computer, give the meds). Why not add this guy's ECG unit to that?
Someone's life is at stake? Raise prices!
That's the scumbag side of supply and demand for you.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
The Scientific American article was called "Home is where the ECG is" and can be found at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000C74E 4-5172-1C74-9B81809EC588EF21 . It's a very good article, except that it relies on the AD624AD, which is expensive. The 624AD is overkill--I have personally built the same project with a lesser chip, with fine results.
I attempted to build one of these a few years ago, beginning with the SciAm article, but found that the 624AD was out of production at the time. I checked around with the other big semi companies, and eventually got Linear Technology to send me a few free samples of their low-noise instrument amplifier, the LT1167. (http://www.linear.com/prod/datasheet.html?datashe et=437)
I used it with a gain of 1000 (it can be raised to as high as 10000), inside a metal biscuit tin, with the two differential inputs from the left and right wrists, and a ground on the ankle. For power I used two 9V batteries with the + of one and - of another tied to ground to produce +9 and -9 V. Using some thin coax cable for the leads reduced noise, as did commercially-manufactured EKG electrodes and gel.
In the end my DIY "bioamplifier" got me a very clean EKG-type trace into a digital storage scope. Because it didn't have any isolation, optical or otherwise, I never hooked it up to anyone except myself, but for the one or two times I had to demonstrate it, it worked like a charm.
It also worked as an EMG, with the gain dialed down a bit I could put both leads on my bicep and then flex to produce a signal on the 'scope. I never tried it, but I think up at the higher end of its gain range it could probably do crude EEG as well.
Cheers,
KB1JMV
Jason,
I read your interesting experience with ECG. You were worried about your negative "S" wave and thought it might be due to some construction problem. It probably isn't. I'm no electrical engineer, but I am a medical doctor, and I was tought how the thing works.
In a basic ECG reading, there are 12 leads. Each corresponds to a different way of considering which electrode is picking up the signal, and which ones are used as a reference. 3 leads are so-called "bi-polar" and are often tagged "I, II, III". 3 leads are the so-called "augmented unipolar limb leads" and are tagged "aVR, aVL, aVF". The 6 other are the so-called "chest" leads and are often tagged "V1" to "V6". There are additional lines that go all the way to "V12", but we'll forget them for now.
The general idea is to pick up the heart's electrical vector in a vertical plane (for the bi-polar and augmented unipolar leads) in 6 evenly spaced directions. The chest leads do the same in a horizontal plane.
In a regular ECG, electrodes are placed on each wrist and on each ankles (although one ankle would be enough). If you consider a person with his arms spread out and approximately at 30 degrees elevation, and both legs together and extended, you have the image of a triangle, more or less centered around the heart.
Bipolar leads take the input from two of the leads, using the other one as a reference (I think). Thus, "I" is a horizontal vector going from left arm to right arm. "II" goes from the right arm to the legs. "III" goes from the left arm to the legs. Each lead in pink in the following diagram is parallel to one of the green lines of the triangle.
The augmented unipolar limb leads work by considering only one of the limbs, and the others as reference (? still not sur about the reference thing, though).
When you consider this, you have 12 evenly spaced recordings of the electrical activity of the heart, in a vertical pane (I, -aVR, II, aVF, III, -aVL, -I, aVR, -II, -aVF, -III, aVL).
The chest leads are simple unipolar leads that start just to the right of the sternum (V1) and are regularly spaced from just to the left of the sternum to under the left armpit (V2 to V6). They obviously give a "picture" of the heart's electrical activity in a horizontal pane.
The aspect of a lead is always roughly the same.
The aspect of the different waves depends on what perspective you are using to "see" the heart. The most prominent wave is the so-called "QRS" complex. This is actually the electrical signal that represents the loss of polarity of the heart-cells' surface in response to the stimulus. If the wave is going "towards" the electrode, the signal is positive. If it is going away from the electrode, it is negative. The signal first descends towards the tip of the heart, then heads back up a little, hence the tall R and deep S waves that are often seen, mostly on the chest leads, which are "closer" to the heart and are looking "at" the tip of the heart. Thick hearts (because of disease) cause abnormaly tall or deep R or S waves.
On the photo you provide, it you seem to have placed your electrodes in an uncommon "bipolar V1-V6". This is not a standard vector, so don't expect to see anything that resembles a real ECG. Therefore, I think there is nothing wrong with your apparatus. Try placing the red and black electrodes one on each arm and the other (green) one on the thigh. You'll probably get something much closer to the usual aspect of an ECG.
Just my 0.02 euros...
Hope this helps.