Chapter I. Introduction

This chapter summarizes new needs, new opportunities, new challenges, and new fields for development of innovative IT methods for permanent and ubiquitous cardiological monitoring. The main idea for new generation of telecardiological devices goes as follows: Bad heart always under permanent qualified observation, and every ill patient never without help—irrespective of moment of time and place on Earth. The method proposed in this book for accomplishing such a goal and realization of the presented idea is based on three elements:

• individual patients' heart signal acquisition kits;

• advanced wireless communication equipment; and

• intelligent cardiological data analysis centers, based on the semantic-oriented and CI (computational intelligence) powered Web solutions.