Noise-robust electrocardiogram R-peak detection with adaptive filter and variable threshold

There have been numerous studies on extracting the R-peak from electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. However, most of the detection methods are complicated to implement in a real-time portable electrocardiograph device and have the disadvantage of requiring a large amount of calculations. R-peak detection requires pre-processing and post-processing related to baseline drift and the removal of noise from the commercial power supply for ECG data. An adaptive filter technique is widely used for R-peak detection, but the R-peak value cannot be detected when the input is lower than a threshold value. Moreover, there is a problem in detecting the P-peak and T-peak values due to the derivation of an erroneous threshold value as a result of noise. We propose a robust R-peak detection algorithm with low complexity and simple computation to solve these problems. The proposed scheme removes the baseline drift in ECG signals using an adaptive filter to solve the problems involved in threshold extraction. We also propose a technique to extract the appropriate threshold value automatically using the minimum and maximum values of the filtered ECG signal. To detect the R-peak from the ECG signal, we propose a threshold neighborhood search technique. Through experiments, we confirmed the improvement of the R-peak detection accuracy of the proposed method and achieved a detection speed that is suitable for a mobile system by reducing the amount of calculation. The experimental results show that the heart rate detection accuracy and sensitivity were very high (about 100%).