Fully digital pacemaker detection in ECG signals using a non-linear filtering approach

This paper deals with the detection of pacemaker pulses in an electrocardiogram (ECG) waveform. In order to realize a pulse detector that is robust to a wide-band electromyographic (EMG) noise, we propose a (patent pending) fully digital approach that exploits a two step filtering strategy, followed by a threshold comparison. By resorting to computer simulations which employ a synthetic and realistic ECG signal model, we show that our approach is particularly effective and it significantly outperforms a well known patented algorithm.