Design of heart rate variability processor for portable 3-lead ECG monitoring system-on-chip

The worldwide population of people over the age of 65 has been predicted to more than double from 1990 to 2025. Therefore, ubiquitous health-care systems have become an important topic of research in recent years. In this paper, an integrated system for portable electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring, with an on-board processor for time-frequency analysis of heart rate variability (HRV), is presented. The main function of proposed system comprises three parts, namely, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) controller, an HRV processor, and a lossless compression engine. At the beginning, ECG data acquired from front-end circuits through the ADC controller is passed through the HRV processor for analysis. Next, the HRV processor performs real-time analysis of time-frequency HRV using the Lomb periodogram and a sliding window configuration. The Lomb periodogram is suited for spectral analysis of unevenly sampled data and has been applied to time-frequency analysis of HRV in the proposed system. Finally, the ECG data are compressed by 2.5 times using the lossless compression engine before output using universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART). Bluetooth is employed to transmit analyzed HRV data and raw ECG data to a remote station for display or further analysis. The integrated ECG health-care system design proposed has been implemented using UMC 90nm CMOS technology.

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