A fast and accurate FPGA based QRS detection system

An accurate Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based ECG Analysis system is described in this paper. The design, based on a popular software based QRS detection algorithm, calculates the threshold value for the next peak detection cycle, from the median of eight previously detected peaks. The hardware design has accuracy in excess of 96% in detecting the beats correctly when tested with a subset of five 30 minute data records obtained from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. The design, implemented using a proprietary design tool (System Generator®), is an extension of our previous work and uses 76% resources available in a small-sized FPGA device (Xilinx Spartan® xc3s500), has a higher detection accuracy as compared to our previous design and takes almost half the analysis time in comparison to software based approach.