A real-time QRS detector based on low-pass differentiator and hilbert transform

Abstract

Electrocardiogram(ECG) is an important physiological signal of the human body. It is widely used in identification and arrhythmia detection. The first step of ECG application is signal segmentation, that is, the QRS detection. An effective and real-time QRS detection algorithm is proposed in this paper. A differentiator with adjustable center frequency is used to capture the first derivative information of the frequency band of the electrocardiogram. Then Hilbert transform is used to generate the envelope of the first derivative. After that, a dual threshold method is introduced to decrease FP and FN. Finally, a more precise R wave position is determined based on derivative method. The detector is validated on MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The result show that the proposed algorithm has a high Sensitivity of 99.87%, Specificity of 99.84%, and the detection error rate is 0.28%. The average execution time of a 30 minutes record is 2.45s.