Motion artifact suppression in the ECG signal by successive modifications in frequency and time

Ambulatory electrocardiogram signals can be contaminated with various types of noise. Among these, electrode motion `em´ artifacts are considered particularly undesired as they can be mistaken for ectopic beats. Unfortunately, `em´ noise has proved difficult to tackle using ordinary filtering techniques. In this paper, we explore a novel filtering alternative, and show that it could be considered as a potential candidate for dealing with electrode motion artifacts. The proposed system is composed of two simple parts: a frequency filter and a time window, interconnected in series. The two components are designed such that the overall system operates optimally in the mean square error sense. Experimentation on signals obtained from the MIT-BIH database demonstrates the superiority of the above approach over optimal Fourier filtering.