Prototyping Tool for Real-time ECG Monitoring and Analysis

Measuring the heart rate is one critical piece of information that a health professional uses to assess the health state of an individual. The Electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG) signal and its extracted features play an essential role in patient status monitoring and diagnosis of cardiac disease. Therefore, this paper presents how to design, build, and test a cost-effective prototyping tool for ECG feature extraction and recognition. When testing a real ECG from a human subject, the developed tool can preserve useful ECG information while removing noise and interference components by adaptively determining filtering values that directly translate to an analog circuit for rapid prototyping. Then a decision-making model utilizing a peak detection strategy is applied for automated heart rate calculation and state recognition in real-time.