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Ambulatory Electrocardiogram (AECG) monitoring services are among the most relevant Ubiquitous Health (U-Health) applications due to the high prevalence of cardiovascular disease [1,2]. There are a large number of cardiac pathologies, but healthcare specialists show great interest in diagnosing some of them. Of particular interest are pathologies whose symptoms are palpitations, dizziness and sporadic syncopes, i.e., cardiac conditions that require long-term monitoring systems in order to be diagnosed. The detection of arrhythmic cardiac events (ventricular tachycardia, atrial fibrillation, bradycardia, etc.) allows the cardiologist to provide the patient with the most appropiate treatment, usually based on drug administration or pacemaker/ICD implantation.

Furthermore, cardiac event detection may be really useful in order to diagnose relevant chronic diseases, such as heart failure. Thus, AECG services that allow continuous and long-term patient monitoring are required to improve diagnosis and treatment of cardivascular diseases. In this sense, cardiologists are very interested in new U-Health services aimed at monitoring of patients that suffer from paroxysmal arrhythmias and sporadic syncopes. Besides from the clinical utility, these new healthcare services should be capable of improving the patient’s quality of life [3].Nowadays, AECG monitoring services used by cardiologists are based on conventional Holter devices and implantable loop recorder systems [4�C6]. These systems fulfill the patient’s cardiac activity monitoring and allow detecting several types of arrhythmias.

However, these systems also present several limitations such as the duration of the monitoring session due to a limited storage capacity and reduced ergonomics. These features may be improved using U-Health approaches. Thus, the new so-called HOLTIN (for INtelligent HOLTer) service has been designed in-house at the Public University of Navarre [7,8]. This service is focused on monitoring of patients that are at low risk, and whose sympthoms are sporadic arrhythmias (ventricular tachycardia, bradycardia), asystolic pauses, and syncopes. Moreover, essential aspects related to development and delivery of U-Health services have been considered in HOLTIN system such as: service goals definition, healthcare professional requirements, Drug_discovery technology selection, clinical evaluation, satisfaction of patients, etc.

A comparative analysis between the HOLTIN service and conventional AECG monitoring systems is shown in Table 1.Table 1.Comparison of Features and Functionalities found in AECG systems.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the implementation of the HOLTIN service, with special emphasis on the wearable ECG device used by the patient and its functional model.