Wireless World: Wirelessly monitoring ECGs

CHICAGO, March 24 (UPI) -- An elderly woman has a heart attack. Paramedics arrive on the scene at her home a few minutes later and begin to revive her, and hook up an electrocardiogram transmitter to her chest, and send the signals, wirelessly, to a cardiologist at the hospital, who reads the vital signs on a handheld device. That technology advance is now saving lives, experts tell United Press International's Wireless World. And it's just one of the ways hospitals are today innovatively using wireless devices.

A new study, conducted by cardiologists at Duke University Medical Center and the NorthEast Medical Center, located in North Carolina, found that doctors can find and remove clots from heart-attack patients in half the time that they previously took, because of wireless transmission of ECGs en route to the hospital. Reducing the amount of time before surgery begins is vital, for the faster the doctors open an artery, the higher the odds are that the patient's heart muscle can be saved. By Gene Koprowski