Major studies have reported that heart related issues will be a major health risk in developing and developed countries alike. The problem is more acute in developing nations because of the lack of enough trained cardiologists and also because of the high cost of the traditional electro cardio grams (ECGs). In the current work we propose a design for a low-cost and user firendly smartphone based ECG (SmartECG). The major contributions of the work lie in the innovative design of the analog part and in the efficient use of the limited processing power of a smart phone to display and store the ECG, and extract some of the major features from it.