A modified adaptive noise canceler for electrocardiography with no power-line reference

Power-line interference can severely distort electrocardiographs (ECGs). Several techniques have been proposed to eliminate the power-line interference without affecting the ECGs. One of the well-established techniques is the Adaptive Noise Canceler (ANC). In this paper we propose an improvement to the ANC by eliminating the need to sample an external power-line reference. The proposed method is shown to be comparable in performance to the ANC. It is therefore possible to implement the proposed canceler in software without the need to change the acquisition hardware system as was previously needed by the ANC.