First Trial of Home ECG and Blood Pressure Telemonitoring System in Macau

Objective: To determine the feasibility of home monitoring of patients with cardiac disease or hypertension.

Methods: An improved home electrocardiographic and blood pressure telemonitoring system linked to a central workstation was tested in 10 patients in Macau for 3 months.

Results: The total number of connections was 1377. Of the automatic alarm connections, 32.5% were false positive, with the percentage of false positives ranging from 7.6 to 54.6 for different patients. Both patients and physicians found the system easy to use.

Conclusions: Further investigation is required to match the number of patients with the system capacity. A more robust dysrhythmia detection algorithm is needed to reduce the number of false alarms. Nevertheless, the results were sufficiently good that the trial is being expanded.