A MICROPOWER ANALOG-DIGITAL HEART-RATE DETECTOR CHIP

A micropower detector chip integrated with CMOS technology has been developed for a hand-held heart rate monitoring instrument mainly used by professional athletes and others who exercise seriously to increase their endurance and overall performance. The chip uses linear bandpass filtering and threshold detection and is implemented with analog switched-capacitor (SC) and digital techniques. The bandpass filter transfer function is derived from the spectral contents of noisy ECG signals, The layout was designed in full custom style in order to minimize the silicon area. The chip achieves a detection rate of 90% with a simulated ECG signal corrupted with Gaussian noise (signal-to-noise ratio = 5) in the heart rate range 60-200 l/min with a total current consumption of less than 30 muA from a 3-V supply. The detection rate is 96.9% for a noisy signal obtained from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database.