Design of QRS detection and heart rate estimation system on FPGA

Abstract

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a representative signal containing information of the heart. The main tasks in ECG signal analysis are the detection of QRS complex & the estimation of instantaneous heart rate by measuring the time interval between two consecutive R-waves. An algorithm based on wavelet transforms which uses the quadrature spline wavelet for the detection of QRS complex is developed & implemented on FPGA. The proposed system can operate at a maximum throughput of 52.662 MSamples/sec in the real time, while the sampling rate of ECG signal is only few hundred samples/sec. Thus the system can work on both online and offline at maximum possible throughput. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.