Readily available ECG databases

Medical databases are an essential tool in health research that have become more frequently used in the last few decades alongside the growth and worldwide availability of the internet. Heart diseases are one of the most common health problems in the world with a vast amount of work being done on disease prevention and surveillance. With respect to arrhythmia detection, the electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most studied monitoring tools to date, generating large amounts of real-time data and giving rise to readily available ECG databases. In this research, we provide an overview of the most cited ECG databases with public/read access and discuss their characteristics with emphasis on the ECG records, as well as their use and applications carried out by other researchers around the world.