FPGA IMPLEMENTATION SYSTEM FOR QRS COMPLEX DETECTION

Abstract

Due to the rising number of cardiovascular diseases death, the monitoring of cardiac patients has become a primary objective in the world. In this context, a fully FPGA-based system, for ECG signal monitoring and cardiac arrhythmia detection, has been proposed. The proposed QRS detection method is inspired by the Pan and Tompkins algorithm. It is optimized to be implemented in FPGA board Spartan 3 E (Nexys 2) using the VHDL language on the Xilinx ISE 14.2. In order to evaluate the effectiveness and reliability of our system, three comparative studies have been performed. The first comparison targeted the different results obtained with a floating-point representation under Matlab on one hand, and a fixed point representation under Xilinx ISE on the other hand, both using the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database records. The second comparison concerns the results obtained from the records of eight preselected subjects, with a commercialized electronic armband device ROMED BP-WR20 in a real-time test. The third is a comparison between the performance of our proposed method with the recent works in terms of reducing the FPGA resources list. The full embedded system has been realized completely from the signal acquisition to the display using the analog discovery device. The designed architecture has been validated using records obtained from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database. It has also been validated in real-time via the analog discovery device. The overall accuracy and sensitivity are obtained as 97.6% and 97.3%, respectively.