Development and Evaluation of One Arm Electrode Based ECG Measurement System

Abstract

In this work we have developed an electrocardiogram (ECG) measurement system, which measures ECG by two electrodes attached to the left arm of the subject. The measurement system consists of wrist and upper arm electrodes connected to an amplifier, which is further connected via data acquisition card to a laptop-computer. The computer included Labview® and Matlab® based integrated real-time analysis software, which reads, filters and analyzes the ECG signal. In the implementation of the system specific solutions to the amplifier and analysis software were built to be able to measure and interpret the very weak and noisy ECG signal originating from the electrodes. The measurement system was evaluated by comparing the heart rate interval data calculated from the new ECG measurement system to Polar S810i heart rate meter and Biopac M35 measurement system. The results showed that the new ECG measurement system yielded equal results compared to the reference measurements for subjects at rest. For moving subjects the reliability of the new measurement system reduced due to artefacts. The application experiences about the system were especially encouraging. The usability of the system was excellent due to simple one-arm electrode solution.