ECG Generator for Educational Biomedical Engineering Laboratory

Mounaim Aqil,Atman Jbari

doi:10.3991/ijoe.v18i02.25363

Abstract

The aim of this work is to design and implement an ECG generator for didactic biomedical engineering laboratory. The proposed generator provides analog ECG signals using synthesized or experimental records. The technique used in this work consists to generate the desired ECG waveforms through the PWM outputs of an Arduino board and low-pass filter. To provide many educational functions in both analog instrumentation and digital processing, the generator supplies output voltages in asymmetric or differential mode. To allow the user to setup the ECG signal to be generated, a LabVIEW application has been implemented. Experimentations on proposed generator and results were accomplished using the NI USB 6009 acquisition module and NI MAX software.

Highlights

Biomedical engineering has gained great importance in the last decade
The idea of this work stems from the fact that biomedical signal generators are expensive and may be out of reach for some research laboratories with limited budgets
The hardware of the generator consists of the following elements: An Arduino Mega board. It receives on its USB port the ECG signal samples that the user has built and generates eight analog ECG signals on its PWM outputs

Summary

Introduction

Among its objectives are the study, acquisition, processing and analysis of biomedical signals that provide valuable information about the health of the different organs of the human body. The ECG signal is one of the most important of these signals because it provides important information about the health of the heart. In the teaching of this discipline, ECG signal generators are needed to generate different types of analog ECG signals with different pathologies and the possibility of adding different types of noise such as baseline wander, power line interference and Gaussian white noise. The objective of this work is to present an ECG signal generator for educational purposes. The idea of this work stems from the fact that biomedical signal generators are expensive and may be out of reach for some research laboratories with limited budgets.

ECG generation techniques

Specifications

Experimentation results and discussion

Analog ECG signal generation and visualization

Conclusion

Authors