Implementation of heart rate variability analysis algorithm on FPGA platform

Abstract

Recently, many studies have attempted to develop portable cardiac monitoring systems that can be used outside of a hospital setting. To achieve this objective, in this paper, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) design and the implementation of an embedded electrocardiography (ECG) system using System-on-Chip (ECG-SoC) technology are proposed. The proposed system performs ECG pre-processing and heart rate variability (HRV) feature extraction that are suitable for remote homecare monitoring and rural health care applications. The development of ECG-SoC consists of four phases: the development of the hardware system, the Nios II-Linux embedded operating system (OS), the ECG-SoC software, and followed by system integration. The results of this study show that the developed ECG-SoC system is capable of compiling a raw ECG dataset, detecting QRS, computing R-R intervals, and displaying the FFT output and power spectrum analysis. The proposed system has the potential to be used in the future as a portable stand alone medical device for heart disease detection and monitoring.