STRONG REAL-TIME QRS COMPLEX DETECTION

Abstract

Heart rate variability (HRV) analysis is used as a marker of autonomic nervous system activity which may be related to mental and/or physical activity. HRV features can be extracted by detecting QRS complexes from an electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. The difficulties in QRS complex detection are due to the artifacts and noises that may appear in the ECG signal when subjects are performing their daily life activities such as exercise, posture changes, climbing stairs, walking, running, etc. This study describes a strong computation method for real-time QRS complex detection. The detection is improved by the prediction of the position of [Formula: see text] waves by the estimation of the RR intervals lengths. The estimation is done by computing the intensity of the electromyogram noises that appear in the ECG signals and known here in this paper as ECG Trunk Muscles Signals Amplitude (ECG-TMSA). The heart rate (HR) and ECG-TMSA increases with the movement of the subject. We use this property to estimate the lengths of the RR intervals. The method was tested using famous databases, and also with signals acquired when an experiment with 17 subjects from our laboratory. The obtained results using ECG signals from the MIT-Noise Stress Test Database show a QRS complex detection error rate (ER) of 9.06%, a sensitivity of 95.18% and a positive prediction of 95.23%. This method was also tested against MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database, the result are 99.68% of sensitivity and 99.89% of positive predictivity, with ER of 0.40%. When applied to the signals obtained from the 17 subjects, the algorithm gave an interesting result of 0.00025% as ER, 99.97% as sensitivity and 99.99% as positive predictivity.