Heart-rate Monitoring System Design and Analysis Using a Nios II Soft-core Processor

Abstract

The heart rate of a person is able to tell whether they are healthy. A heart-rate monitoring device is able to measure or record the heart rate of a person in real time, whether it is an electrocardiogram (ECG) or a photoplethysmogram (PPG). In this work, a microprocessor system loaded with a heart-rate monitoring algorithm is implemented. The microprocessor system is the Nios II processor system, which interfaces with an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) and a pulse sensor. A beat-finding algorithm is used in the microprocessor system for heart rate measurement. An experiment is carried out to analyse the functionality of the microprocessor system loaded with the algorithm. The results show that the detected heart rate is in the range of the average human being's heart rate. The signal flow within the microprocessor system is observed and analysed using SignalTap II from Quartus' software. Based on a power analysis report, the proposed microprocessor system has a total power dissipation of around 218.26 mW.