FPGA Based Arrhythmia Detection

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Abstract This paper proposes a simple and reliable Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based ECG Analysis system. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is important biomedical signal, which show the electrical activity of the heart. ECG waveform provides the valuable information for detection of abnormal heart diseases. For accurate analysis, ECG signal must be processed to remove the noise signal. Also, various features of ECG must be extracted for diagnosis of cardiac disorders. Thus, ECG signal processing includes two stages: Preprocessing and Feature Extraction. Preprocessing stage removes noise from the raw ECG signal and the feature extraction stage extracts diagnostic information from the ECG signal. The main objectives of the work are (i) ECG signal enhancement using Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) based method. (ii) Detection of R peaks which is the first step towards automatic detection of cardiac arrhythmias in ECG signal. The proposed system can detect three different arrhythmias. 94.76% accuracy of the proposed method is achieved in detecting the different heart Arrhythmias correctly by using subset of data records from the MIT-BIH database . The system is implemented using Verilog HDL and Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA respectively.