ADVANCES IN ECG DATA

ACQUISITION AND
DISPLAY

vipinquilon@gmail.com
CONTENT
¨ Introduction
¨ Need for New Systems
¨ Embedded ECG System with MATLAB-based GUI
* System Description
* ECG Signal Acquisition System
*Online ECG Processing software
¨ Wearable Wireless ECG System
*Hardware System
*Monitoring Application for Mobile Device
¨ Conclusion
¨ References

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INTRODUCTION
¨ ECG/EKG is the short for electrocardiograph.
It is widely accepted and non-invasive tool for
cardiac investigations. Two new systems of
data acquisition and display of ECG signal are
discussed
1) EMBEDDED ECG SYSTEM WITH MATLAB
BASED GUI
2) WEARABLE WIRELESS ECG SYSTEM

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ECG/EKG
¨ Instrument recording heart’s electrical activity

¨ ECG provides valuable information about a

wide range of cardiac disorders

¨ ECG waveform consists of P, QRS and T

segments

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ECG WAVEFORM
3. Ventricular
2. Ventricular repolarization
depolarization

1. Atrial
depolarization

Fig. 1 ECG waveform

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NEED FOR NEW SYSTEMS
¨ Low power, cheap and high-speed features

¨ Remote monitoring of patients

¨ Automatic detection of disorders

5
EMBEDDED ECG SYSTEM WITH
MATLAB BASED GUI
¨ System consists of two parts

1) An accurate ECG signal acquisition system

to collect online ECG data

2) A software to provide a user-friendly

interface to the user

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System Description

Fig. 2 Block schematic of the developed system

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System Description

Fig. 3 Analog Processing Circuit for the ECG Signal

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ECG Signal Acquisition System
¨ It consists of
1) An analog signal conditioning circuit
(including filter, instrumentation amplifier)
2) An ADC
3) A microcontroller
4) A TTL-RS232 level converter

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ECG Signal Acquisition System
¨ ECG signal is applied at the input of signal
conditioner

¨ Output of signal conditioner is fed to ADC

input, which provides 8-bit data to the
microcontroller unit

¨ Microcontroller converts ADC output into a

serial bit-stream for delivery to PC through
serial port
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Online ECG Processing Software

¨ Starting point of ECG signal processing is

accurate determination of R-peaks

¨ Algorithm is developed considering maximum

possible deviations from normal ECG

¨ All the time-plane extracted features are

displayed along with display plot for ECG
signal
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ECG Visualisation

Fig. 4 Developed GUI with signal plots and processed ECG

features
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WEARABLE WIRELESS ECG
SYSTEM
¨ System comprises two parts

1) Hardware System

2) Monitoring Application for The Mobile

Phone

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System Description

Fig. 5 System Description

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Hardware System

Hardware
System

Bluetooth
Signal Signal
Data
Acquisition Processing
Transmission

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Hardware System: Signal
Acquisition
¨ Simple Three Lead System Used

¨ Use of differential amplifier with a gain around

1000, CMMR greater than 110 db and 0.05-
200 Hz bandwidth is required

¨ Filtering stage is a band pass filter to eliminate

artefacts

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Hardware System: Signal
Processing
¨ For analog to digital conversion, PIC16F876
microcontroller is used

¨ FPGAs is used to allow reconfigurable

systems

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Hardware Systems: Bluetooth Data
Transmission
¨ Bluetooth module used is the WRAP THOR
2022-1-B2B chip from BlueGiga

¨ Bluetooth module provides an API for

communication through the AT commands

¨ Internal parameters of Bluetooth module

optimized to get the lowest consumption mode

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Monitoring Application For Mobile
Device
¨ Allows monitoring patient’s ECG in real time

¨ Mobile device used as server or client

¨ Application developed using the Java platform

form for embedded devices (J2ME)

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ECG Visualisation

Fig. 6 ECG visualisation in the mobile phone

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CONCLUSION
¨ Low cost system
¨ Automatic detection of pathologies
¨ Inclusion of other biomedical signals such as
EMG is possible
¨ Remote monitoring can enhance healthcare
on a large scale
¨ Improvements to connect to a hospital
database possible

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