Low-Power Embedded ECG Acquisition System for Real-Time Monitoring and Analysis

Electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring is extensively used in medical technology for determining patient heart conditions. The analysis of an ECG necessitates real-time waveform acquisition. Traditional ECG systems are bulky, require complex processing, and are very costly. Therefore, there is a need to develop a low-power, low-cost, handheld, and portable ECG monitoring system for use in remote places and rural areas. This paper presents the design and development of a compact and low-power ECG data acquisition system. The key idea is to develop an embedded system that makes ECG acquisition simple and accessible at any time. The proposed system uses an ECG chip to sense ECG pulses. An embedded ECG acquisition system is designed using a Snapdragon 820 processor for ECG data processing and an STM32 microcontroller unit (MCU) to store the data generated by the ECG chip. An SPI protocol is used for data communication between the ECG chip and the STM32 MCU, and USB-based data communication is used for the STM32 and the Snapdragon 820 processors. An Android-based graphical user interface was also developed to initialize, process, and monitor the ECG data on the LCD screen. A 12-lead ECG system is designed and tested for real-time acquisition. Various digital filters are applied to process ECG data, and a comparative analysis is presented. The system is validated by comparing the Android GUI results to the ECG chip output data. An experiment tested the accurate acquisition of ECG waveforms with filtering at 0.5 Hz, 50 Hz, and 100 Hz.