Design And Implement Of A Portable Ecg Monitoring System Using Embedded System

Cardiovascular disease is one of the major diseases that seriously threat to people's health. In China, the number of people dead from cardiovascular disease has taken 44 percent of the death toll. Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system can effectively detect rare cardiac events, and it's very important to the early prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. There are plenty of disadvantages of the traditional ECG monitor: big size, high power consumption, un-portable for patients, and very expensive. These disadvantages make traditional ECG monitor difficult to be used widely. The widely use of portable ECG monitoring system can help to improve the prevention, treatment and healing of cardiovascular disease.According to the insufficiency of the portable ECG monitoring system on market, this paper presents a new portable ECG monitoring system with three monitoring mode: Dynamic ECG Monitoring Mode, Bed-side ECG Monitoring Mode, and Remote ECG Monitoring Mode. This paper also design and implement a prototype of a new portable ECG monitoring device, which is the most important part of this system.The device is based on ARM7 embedded system, which can sense, amplify, record, analyze, and transmit the ECG signal to a PC or a server, and also provides functions of calculating of cardiac rate, diagnosis of five usual arrhythmias, and auto/manual alarming. The portable ECG monitoring device also includes a four-key keyboard to input commands, a LCD screen to display Graphical User Interface (GUI), a SD card interface and an Ethernet interface for ECG data transmitting. The hardware part of the portable device uses 3.3V voltage supply, which is useful for power consumption reduction. And the software part presents an improving difference threshold value algorithm to improving the detecting of R wave.After the implementation of the prototype, this paper presents the testing of some functions of the portable device. According to the testing results, the portable device fits the expected performance fairly well, and the tested functions work well.The last section of this paper is a conclusion of this work, which also suggests the feasibility of future.