A portable real time ECG device for arrhythmia detection using raspberry Pi

Abstract

Arrhythmia related disorders are one of the leading causes of cardiac deaths in the world. Previous studies have shown that Arrhythmia can further lead to major cardiac diseases like the Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) syndrome. The difficulty in detecting Arrhythmia in the early stages often results in poor prognosis and presents the need for a costefficient diagnostic device. To this end, we propose a realtime portable ECG device with special emphasis on Arrhythmia detection and classification. The device is centered on a Raspberry Pi 3 (RasPi) module. RasPi with its signal processing and wireless transfer capabilities acts like an adapter between the sensors and a personalized mobile device application that is used for tracking the ECG. A highly sensitive peak detection algorithm was used by RasPi to detect and extract features from the ECG signals at real time. The peak detection algorithm was tested on the standard MITBIH arrhythmia database and reported an accuracy of greater than 95%. Hence, we propose a novel low cost approach towards arrhythmia monitoring and detection with wide applications in mobile health systems.