A real-time heart beat detector and quantitative investigation based on FPGA

A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based system for single-lead electrocardiogram signal QRS complex detection is presented in this paper. The system consists of Quadratic Spline wavelet transform, moving average filter, signed squaring and a Modulus Maxima Pair Recognition module. The parallel and pipelined architecture of the system allows a maximum throughput equals 46MS/s. The QRS Complex detection accuracy is validated using MIT/BIH arrhythmia database, in which, sensitivity of 99.35% and predictivity of 99.70% are achieved. Less than 2000 logic elements are utilized to implement this algorithm in an Altera cycloneH FPGA. The performance and resource consumption show that the design also suits for digital ASIC, which benefits in processing high volume of ECG data.