Design of a wireless single arm electrocardiograph system

Abstract

Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are a method of assessment of cardiac electrical activity. It is the heart's electrophysiological activity that occurs by the conduction of electrical impulses from the Sinoatrial (SA) node and the Atrioventricular (AV) node across the cardiac muscles and is displayed as a voltage-time graph. Conventionally, they have been acquired using a system of ten surface electrodes placed in different locations throughout the body in a 12-lead system. Single Arm ECG systems, where the ECG rhythm is obtained from only a single part of the body, replace the need for ten different electrodes to detect the heart's activity. Three pre-gelled electrodes are applied in different locations of the left arm to derive the sinus rhythm signal of a subject. An operational amplifier-based hardware instrument has been developed for this purpose with active filters and amplifiers to perform signal conditioning. This paper demonstrates the implementation of a single-arm hardware system of small size to improve portability, used as an ECG detection method and the results from various subjects taken at different gain values to enhance the view of the signal, while also presenting an approach to transmit the data of the signals wirelessly through an Internet-of-things (IoT) platform using ThingSpeak which permits to aggregate, visualize, and analyze live data streams in the cloud.