A circuit includes a sensor coupled to a processor. The sensor senses an
electrical signal that is representative of a patient parameter, and the
processor determines a condition of the patient by analyzing first and
second overlapping portions of the sensed electrical signal. For example,
a portable AED can include such a circuit to sense first and second
overlapping sections of an ECG. By utilizing this overlapping-window
technique, the AED can obtain and analyze multiple sections of ECG data,
and thus can make a shock/no-shock decision, more quickly than an AED
using contiguous-window analysis. Thus, the overlapping-window technique
allows one to use both longer ECG sections (better accuracy per window)
and more of these longer sections (better voting accuracy) over a given
analysis time. Furthermore, this overlapping-window technique
significantly reduces or eliminates boundary problems because the
boundary of one ECG section is within the interior of either the
preceding or the following overlapping ECG section.