#Digital filter designer portable#

Electromyographic (EMG) noise is induced by electrical activities of skeletal muscles during periods of contraction.

The baseline drifts are mainly caused by respiration and perspiration.

Instrumentation noise is due to radio frequency interference from other equipment, e.g., implanted devices such as pacemakers.

Motion artifacts are generated by changes in the skin-electrode impedance because of a patient’s movement during recording.

The electrode contact noise is due to electrode “popping” or a loose contact with the skin.

Nonetheless, ECG recordings are often contaminated by residual powerline interference due to differences in electrode impedances and also because of stray currents through the patient and the cables. The analog front-end processing circuitry consists of an instrumentation amplifier and a filter that can reduce the powerline interference.

Powerline interference is a narrow-band noise centered at 60 Hz or 50 Hz (depending on the country of operation) and its harmonics, with a bandwidth of less than 1 Hz.

In general, ECG signal contaminants can be classified into six categories : A schematic presentation of a wearable ECG device where the captured signal is transmitted (through a wireless channel) to a remote backend system for further processing. ECG signal is often contaminated by various types of noise and artifacts that need to be removed and/or suppressed by employing hardware efficient filters. One of the main components of a wearable ECG device is the filtering block. The hardware complexity of each of these building blocks would affect the power consumption, size and cost of the device. As depicted in Fig 1, a wearable ECG device consists of several components in addition to the ECG electrodes (e.g., Analog interface and signal conditioning, A/D converter).

Hardware complexity of the device would also affect the weight, size and cost of the device. For example, a lower power consumption would guarantee a longer battery life. Several requirements (in terms of power consumption, physical size, and cost) must be taken into consideration to design a reliable and practical wearable ECG device. Although much effort has been put into the development of such devices over the past few years, integration of these technologies into the clinical practice still remains limited, mainly due to reliability and practicality issues. For example, utilizing smart wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) devices can significantly enhance healthcare of the patients with cardiovascular diseases. Recent advances in wireless communications and integrated circuits can considerably improve the healthcare management and cost. Continuous monitoring of the heart and its functionality enhances the early diagnosis, intervention, or prevention of cardiovascular diseases. With the demographic shift toward an older population, these costs are expected to increase substantially over the next decade. In 2010, the estimated total cost of cardiovascular disease in the United States alone was $444 billion. The results showed that the new ECG filter has a lower hardware complexity relative to the state-of-the-art ECG filters.Ĭardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for 30% of global mortalities. We also studied the hardware complexity of the proposed structure and compared it with the state-of-the-art.

The new filter structure and several of its useful features are presented in detail.

The design relies on a recently introduced optimally-factored FIR filter method. This work presents a novel low-complexity noise suppression reconfigurable finite impulse response (FIR) filter structure for wearable ECG and heart monitoring devices.

#Digital filter designer portable#

Limited device size, power consumption and cost are critical issues that need to be carefully considered when designing any portable health monitoring device, including a battery-powered ECG device. The ECG signal can be contaminated by various types of noise and artifacts (e.g., powerline interference, baseline wandering) that must be removed or suppressed for accurate ECG signal processing. Wearable and implantable Electrocardiograph (ECG) devices are becoming prevailing tools for continuous real-time personal health monitoring.