FPGA based digital FIR multilevel filtering for ECG denoising

Abstract

The cardiovascular disease is having major impact on human life, in order to diagnose the cardiovascular disease ECG retention along with its information has a got prime importance. Mostly ECG reading has got concern of retrieving correct information by reading the ECG at first glance, which is tackled by having an ECG with all desirable information in it. Normally ECG is associated with variety of unwanted frequencies which mostly gives unexpected interpretation or may corrupt the ECG signal. So it is highly desirable that ECG should get rid of from all the unwanted frequencies and it should have an ideal appearance while retrieving, which can be achieved by implementing the Digital Filters. This article describes the cascade combination of Digital FIR filter design and applied to the ECG signal as ECG is disturbed due to variety of noise frequencies. Here the analysis has been carried out by considering the SNR observed at different windowing technique. After analysis of different combination of FIR low pass, high pass and Notch filter, best SNR found in FIR low pass hamming, FIR high pass Rectangular and FIR Notch Rectangular combination. The proposed FIR filter combination has been designed and synthesized in MATLAB environment and implemented on a FPGA VIRETEX-6 device.