FPGA-based system for heart rate monitoring

The continuous monitoring of cardiac patients requires an ambulatory system that can automatically detect heart diseases. This study presents a new field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based hardware implementation of the QRS complex detection. The proposed detection system is mainly based on the Pan and Tompkins algorithm, but applying a new, simple, and efficient technique in the detection stage. The new method is based on the centred derivative and the intermediate value theorem, to locate the QRS peaks. The proposed architecture has been implemented on FPGA using the Xilinx System Generator for digital signal processor and the Nexys-4 FPGA evaluation kit. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, a comparative study has been performed between the resulting performances and those obtained with existing QRS detection systems, in terms of reliability, execution time, and FPGA resources estimation. The proposed architecture has been validated using the 48 half-hours of records obtained from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database. It has also been validated in real time via the analogue discovery device.