Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are widely used by clinicians to identify the functional status of the heart. Thus, there is considerable interest in automated systems for real-time monitoring of arrhythmia. However, intra- and inter-patient variability as well as the computational limits of real-time monitoring poses significant challenges for practical implementations. The former requires that the classification model be adjusted continuously, and the latter requires a reduction in the number and types of ECG features, and thus, the computational burden, necessary to classify different arrhythmias. We propose the use of adaptive learning to automatically train the classifier on up-to-date ECG data, and employ adaptive feature selection to define unique feature subsets pertinent to different types of arrhythmia. Experimental results show that this hybrid technique outperforms conventional approaches and is therefore a promising new intelligent diagnostic tool.