Patent ID: 7630756

Claim:
A method for detection of an arrhythmia, the method comprising: monitoring the electrical with a monitoring device to produce data representing the heart rhythm; selecting a number of sequential segments of the data, each segment comprising a fixed number of heart beat intervals; determining a duration of each heart beat interval in each of the selected number of segments; calculating an instantaneous heart rate for each heart beat interval in each of the selected number of segments; calculating a mean instantaneous heart rate for the fixed number of heart beat intervals within each of the selected number of segments; within each of the selected number of segments, calculating an absolute deviation from the mean instantaneous heart rate for each of the fixed number of heart beat intervals within the segment; within each of the selected number of segments, selecting a median value of the absolute deviations from the mean instantaneous heart rate; among the selected number of segments, selecting a median of the median values of each of the segments to be a test value; and identifying the arrhythmia by comparing the test value with a predetermined threshold.