Low cost non-invasive instrument for heart disease and peripheral vascular disease detection

In this paper, a simple and low cost simultaneous measurement system of ECG, PCG and four locations of pulse wave is implemented. This system divided into 2 main parts which consists of hardware part for detecting input signal and software part run on computer for processing and displaying the output results The electrode, condenser microphone and piezoelectric are employed to detect electrocardiogram, phonocardiogram and pulse waves, respectively. All detected signals are multiplexed by using frequency division multiplexing (FDM) and then sent to a computer soundcard. The demultiplexing process and other processes such as filtering, noise reduction and displaying are developed on MATLAB software. The measured ECG and PCG signals are used for heart disease detection. For a peripheral vascular disease, it is diagnosed by using pulse wave velocity (PWV) which is the time difference between two pulse wave positions and is measured by using cross-correlation technique. The experimental results show that this instrument can measure and provide ECG, PCG and PWV signals as expected.