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The diagnosis of unexplained syncope and sustained palpitations remains a challenging task for cardiology community. Continuous monitoring of cardiac activity is essential to know the pumping pattern of the heart for patients with mild and severe symptoms. Although attempts have been made towards developing wearable monitoring system, the demand for new system is still open due to affordability and accessibility to resource constrained settings. This research work proposes a wearable smart jacket with a single lead (Ag-NyW) textile sensor for continuous monitoring of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The wearable lead-I textile electrodes are evaluated in terms of visual inspection by the clinician, skin-electrode contact impedance characteristics; fidelity measures such as crest factor, signal band to noise band ratio, mean magnitude squared coherence; and ECG interval characteristics. Experimental study was carried with 212 healthy volunteers after due ethical clearance (age group 18–45 years), and RR variability and heart rate variability were assessed for different age groups and BMI levels. The study revealed that the proposed textile electrodes are comparable to disposable (conventional Ag/AgCl gel) electrodes in terms of fidelity measures, skin-contact impedance, and ECG interval measures. The HRV for different age groups and BMI levels were found to be within the limits as reported in the literature. From the current pilot study with Indian population, this cost-effective wearable ECG monitoring system will be helpful for long-term monitoring in resource constrained settings.

In today's advancement in technology, affordable healthcare services still not in pace for constrained population. Especially cardiac-related screening needs special attention which increases the mortality rate of chronic cardiac patients every day. Several studies showed that most of the rural healthcare centre does not have the Electro Cardiogram (ECG) System for recording the physiological conditions of the patients. This specific study attempts to investigate the usage of Vernier EKG sensor with real time processor for developing portable ECG system. The preliminary work investigates the suitability of the ECG signal quantitatively and qualitatively for clinical support. A case study was shown with two feature extraction, namely, R-R interval, beats per minute and spectral entropy and the application of KNN classifier to distinguish two different physiological conditions. It was observed that the proposed configuration found to be a cost effective procedure. The quantitative and qualitative results confirm the suitability of the proposed system for real time cardiac monitoring of patients as well as screening tool.

External cardiac loop recorder (ELR) is a kind of ECG monitoring system that records cardiac activities of a subject continuously for a long time. When the heart palpitations are not the frequent and nonspecific character, it is difficult to diagnose the disease. In such a case, ELR is used for long-term monitoring of heart signal of the patient. But the cost of ELR is very high. Therefore, it is not prominently available in developing countries like India. Since the design of ELR includes the ECG electrodes, instrumentation amplifier, analog to digital converter, and signal processing unit, a comparative review of each part of the ELR is presented in this paper in order to design a cost effective, low power, and compact kind of ELR. This review will also give different choices available for selecting and designing each part of the ELR system. Finally, the review will suggest the better choice for designing a cost effective external cardiac loop recorder that helps to make it available even for rural people in India.