rhythm strip

A rhythm strip is a long, continuous ECG recording from a single lead, run for many seconds or more, with the aim of studying the heartbeat's rhythm over time. Where a full 12-lead ECG is like a detailed group portrait taken in an instant, a rhythm strip is more like a steady video of one view, watching how beat follows beat.

By laying out a stretch of consecutive beats in a row, the strip makes patterns easy to see: whether the rhythm is regular or irregular, whether beats are dropped, and how the P waves relate to the QRS complexes. The bottom band printed beneath a standard 12-lead ECG is itself a short rhythm strip, usually of one chosen lead.

Rhythm strips are the everyday tool of bedside and telemetry monitoring, capturing intermittent events that a brief 12-lead snapshot might miss, such as occasional skipped beats or short runs of an abnormal rhythm. Because it shows only one viewpoint, however, a rhythm strip is excellent for rhythm but poor for locating regional muscle problems, which need the full multi-lead study.