CERTAIN INVESTIGATIONS ON

ELECTROMAGNETIC INTERFERENCE
IN ECG

Guided by
Dr. UNNI C.
Professor
Dept of ECE
TKMCE

Presented by
ARUN B THAHA
Roll no:T403
M.Tech(Communication
Systems)
TKMCE

INTRODUCTION
Electromagnetic interference (EMI) is a function of power output and frequency of
transmitting device.
EMI is a self-propagating wave in space with electric and magnetic components.
These components oscillate at right angles to each other and to the direction of
propagation.
Radio Waves, Micro
Waves, tetra hertz
radiation
EM
Infra red, Visible
light, UV radiation,
X& Gamma rays

The signal voltage of ECG is in milli volt range. Therefore it is very easy to be
influent by the EM environment.

Exponential

cellular phone result in

level of EM Radiation.

Use of such devices will the productivity but

medical equipments working in its vicinity.

the performance of other

PROBLEM STATEMENT
In this automated era, ECG devices had undergone developments and
advances in its application.
However, the problem of EMI still exists in ECG signal which will adversely
affect the accuracy of ECG measurement.
The error thus occurred will lead to a delay or inappropriate treatment
decision made by the doctor.

This might be a severe problem for those patients who are seriously injured
or to the patients in emergency.
So we should find effective mechanisms to avoid this impact.

OBJECTIVES
To study the environment based condition of EMI during ECG acquisition

To study various noises present in the ECG signals

To study Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT), Wavelet Filtering (WF), Wavelet

Wiener Filtering (WWF) and Adaptive Wavelet Wiener Filtering (AWWF).

To suppress interferences present in ECG signal

LITERATURE SURVEY
Works by Stuchly brothers and Foster on Dielectric properties of
tissues and biological materials in 1980s

Impact of Electromagnetic Interference on Critical Medical

Equipments by RF Devices
Work by Hong Ming and co authors in 2006
Work by Janusek and co authors in 2013

Commercially available simulation tools

Works on ECG Signal processing

EXPERIMENT
To investigate interference (EMI) of electromagnetic fields from GSM mobile
phones several numerical models of human body from the database of NEVA
Electro-magnetics is used.

This study uses a homogeneous human model with permittivity 50 and conductivity
0.5 S/m.
The possibility of charge accumulation by exposing the human body to an electric
field while using GSM mobile phones within in a couple of centimeters is studied
with the E42 software package

E42 PACKAGE

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From the above study it is well clear that the amount of charge accumulated on the
human body also depend on the posture for a given electric field.

The impact of surface charge accumulation on the human body during the ECG
signal acquisition is a great matter of concern as ECG leads may pick this potential
along with the actual signal resulting in inaccurate diagnosis.

The issue is studied with the help of EM field Solver

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EM SOLVER
The basic NEVA EM Solver is robust, fast, and comes with many unique and
detailed human body models. The Solver's available customization is also much
more cost-effective in comparison to most other offerings.

Some Highlights of EM solver are

Small radiation box.
Simulation Environment
Speed

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OBSERVATIONS

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From the above experiments it is clear that the ECG signals might be corrupted by
GSM mobile phones working in its vicinity.
It should be noted that even if the mobile phone is not used for any voice or data
communication it is periodically transmitting low frequency bursts in DTX mode.
The noise level in DTX mode is lower but its characteristics may cause problems as
its presence in ECG signal may mimic fibrillation events, makes the situation more
worst.

So we should find out an efficient mechanism to eliminate such interfering signal

frequencies especially at the ELF and LF band signals emitted during DTX mode.

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WAVELET BASED ADAPTIVE NOISE

CANCELLATION
DATA SETS
Data base employed to asses the performance of this method is obtained from
MIT-BIH database

The artificial noise used are generated individually for each signal
respecting the original noise level and its time dependence.

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SWT
SWT is a modified version WT

Important parameters- decomposition level, impulse characteristics of initial LPF &

HPF.

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WAVELET FILTERING
Based on appropriate adjustment of wavelet coefficients

On the basis of ECG wavelet coefficients it is easy to separate the interference &
signal via thresholding

Effective thresholding requires

Evaluate right value of threshold
To choose right thresholding method

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THRESHOLD LEVEL
x(n) is the noisy signal
x(n) =s(n) + w(n); n=0,1N-1
N length of signal
o On transforming using dyadic SWT
ym(n) = um(n) + vm(n)
Threshold level for modifying coefficients is set on the basis
of noise level vm.

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Threshold value is optimized by

If level is too low- Occurrence of noise

If level is too high- damage the noise free signal
Adaptivity in threshold level selection is achieved by

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WAVELET WIENER FILTERING

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HW is Wiener correction factor

Using HW modified coefficients are obtained

Y(n) is obtained by taking inverse SWT2

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ADAPTIVE WAVELET WIENER

FILTERING

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WWF has many parameters that has to be set manually

Appropriate setting of these parameters has great influence on the

filtering results.

Its not clear that which parameter is suitable for ECG

Parameters vary on noise levels

The robust filtering algorithm should change the parameters on the basis
of noise level

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SETTING PARAMETERS
3 important parameters are taken into consideration here
Level of decomposition
Filter banks
Thresholding methods

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EVALUATION CRITERIA

SNR improvement

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SYNTHETIC NOISE
Most of the authors used white Gaussian noise as artificial
interference
This paper focuses on removing interferences in the LF range.
Therefore noise having power spectrum similar to power
spectrum of interference is created.

Noise = Sin(2*pi*f*length of input)+

SNRin*random(length of input)

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AWWF ALGORITHM
Initialize the necessary parameters
Set SNRin
Noise = Sin(2*pi*f*length of input)+
SNRin*random(length of input)
Noisy ECG = i/p ECG+Noise
Set parameters for WWF(threshold level, threshold type, filter
bank,)
Perform SWT on noisy ECG
Compute Noise estimate using noisy signal and above o/p.

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Use parameters above discussed to perform AWWF

Iterate through each parameters in loops to obtain optimum
values and hence the noise estimate.

Compute the best SNR estimate from stored noise estimate

Filter the ECG signal using the above results.

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SIMULATION RESULT

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CONCLUSIONS
The study shows the worst case level of the interference
induced in ECG electrodes.

Intensity of interference depends on the position of the mobile

phone.
The observations from the simulated study shows that during
ECG acquisition mobile phones should be either switched off
or it should be located at a distance greater than 15 cm from
any of the ECG electrodes to prevent artifacts in the
electrocardiographic signal.

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The proposed algorithm provides better filtering results than other

algorithm based on WWF algorithm for ELF and LF ranges.

The new algorithm is adaptive and adaptation lies in the division of signal
into individual segments each with constant level of noise.
These segments are filtered using parameters appropriate for given noise
level.
Thus its evident that the filter can deal with dynamically changing
noise.

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REFERENCES
1) Stuchly, M. A., and S. S. Stuchly, Dielectric Properties of Biological
SubstancesTabulated, J. of Microwave Power, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1980,
pp. 1926.
2) Foster, K. R., and H. P. Schwan, Dielectric Properties of Tissues and
Biological Materials: A Critical Review, Critical Reviews in Biomedical
Engineering, Vol. 17, No, 1, 1989, pp. 25104.

3) Duck, F. A., Physical Properties of Tissue: A Comprehensive Reference

Book, New York: Academic Press, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

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4) Hong ming, Yajun zhang and Weijiang Pan, Evaluation and Removal of
EMI between ECG Monitor and GSM Mobile Phones, ICWMMN 2006
Proceedings.

5) T. Buczkowski, D. Janusek, H. Zavala-Fernandez, M. Skrok, M. Kania,

A. Liebert, Influence of Mobile Phones on the Quality of ECG Signal
Acquired by Medical Devices, Measurement Science Review, Vol.13,
No. 5, 2013.
6) P. M. Agante and J. P.Marques de Sa, ECG noise filtering using
wavelets with soft-thresholding methods, Comput. Cardiol., vol. 26, pp.
535538, Sep. 1999. DOI: 10.1109/CIC.1999.826026.

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