Digital Recording of Electrocardiographic Data for Analysis by a Digital Computer

A corrected orthogonal 3-lead system has been used to record electrocardiograms directly from patients at Veterans Hospitals, using three FM channels of magnetic tape. A pilot facility has been designed and assembled by NBS to permit a medical technician to inspect these on an oscilloscope and select a significant cardiac cycle. This is automatically sampled at millisecond intervals and the numerical values are stored in digital form on magnetic tape acceptable to an electronic computer. Upon writing various programs for the digital computer, the cardiac researcher will have a flexible tool for objective analysis of large quantities of biological data by a variety of possible criteria.