Comparative study and development of new intracardiac QRS detection algorithms

The work described here arises of a collaboration between the ELA Medical company and the Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy, CNRS URA No 821. ELA Medical manufactures and markets pacemakers, so that one of the tasks of its Research & Development department is to develop fast, reliable, low power intracardiac QRS detection algorithms. This study, situated at the beginning of pacemaker specifications, is aimed to test different detection algorithms and to find out their implementation constraints. This communication presents a comparative study between, on one hand, several classical QRS detection procedures and on the other hand two algorithms derived from the statistical techniques of fault detection in a signal which will be detailed in the second paragraph. These different algorithms have been tested on real signal sequences which represent the principal morphologies frequently found and the third paragraph summarizes their respective performances.