When you are in charge of purchases for a large medical center, a clinic, or a hospital, you may feel an overwhelm with the price range of the available electrocardiography, ECG simulators, and the ECG simulation features.
On one hand you feel that simulation is essential in keeping patient monitors in great working shape since the livelihoods of many of your patients depend on them. On the other hand, you dislike the complexity of the multitude of the features that some simulators provide and you are not sure that you really need them all.
Testing patient monitors on actual patients, even though it might technically be the best possible solution, is quite impractical – who has the nerve to test the equipment in a potentially life threatening situation!
In this article we will go over three standard ECG simulator features that no hospital ECG simulator can do without. When your chosen human patient simulators contain these features, you can rest assured that the ECG analysis part of your patient monitor checks will go well and will produce meaningful results, providing ongoing safety of your patients.
The three must-have standard ECG simulator features are Regular heart wave simulation, Arrhythmic heart wave patterns, Electric noise patterns.
Regular heart wave patterns
A variety of regular heart wave patterns is included with each ECG simulator. It provides a baseline for the testing procedure. While synthetic or real patient heart waves will do in this situation, a mix of both is preferred, for a more realistic assessment.
Synthesized or real patient arrhythmic heart wave patterns
Depending on where in the heart muscle the problems arise, there are several dozens of different types of particular arrhythmias of the heart that can be present in the ECG printout. The heart is basically divided into left and right side, and into the atrium portion (top, smaller), and ventricular portion (bottom, larger). Electrically, the origin of the electric impulses is at the top of the heart, in the atrium walls, and the signal then travels through the walls of atrium, through the AV region (atrium-ventricular region) where it gets appropriately delayed, and finally reaches the ventricular walls.
Abnormal heart patterns are named by the region in which the anomaly originates, and whether it represents faster than normal or slower than normal motion. Every ECG simulator will therefore produce patterns such as ventricular tachycardia, or speedup of ventricular chamber beats, bradycardia or slowing down, missed beat, asystole or no heart beat, SVT, or supra ventricular tachycardia, or faster than normal beating of the heart above the ventricule, and so on. Altogether, there will be three dozens or more of such test patterns included with every ECG simulator machine.
Electric noise patterns
In real life there is always electric noise present everywhere around us. One such important noise component is the 60 Hz noise that is present in the electric wiring of the buildings in the USA, and 50 Hz noise in Europe. Such noise, as well as other noises, perhaps microwave level noise from the cell phones and wireless networks can be incorporated reasonably into the signal of a basic ECG simulator.
