The commonly used methods for ECG Power-line interference removal

Abstract

The amplitude of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is on the millivolt level, and is susceptible to interference from human respiration, muscle tremors, and device circuits during the acquisition process, resulting in baseline drift, electromyographic (EMG) interference, and power line interference. Power line interference is a significant noise source in physiological signal acquisition among these. This article explores several methods to reduce the impact of power frequency interference. By analyzing wavelet transforms, adaptive filtering, and smoothing filters, commonly used methods are evaluated to determine their advantages and limitations. Experimental results show that the smoothed filtering method produces the highest SNR and lowest MSE of the electrocardiogram signal after denoising, resulting in the best denoising effect and thorough filtering. The denoising effect of wavelet transform and adaptive filter is poor. But the different methods for power line interference elimination should be applied according to the data acquisition requirements and equipment performance in response to different situations.