Design And Validation Of A High-performance Electrocardiograph Acquisition Module

Heart disease is a serious threat to human health. In China, with the improvement ofpeople’s living standard increasingly, morbidity rate of heart disease has maintained a highlevel and will increase in future. Therefore, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of heartdisease nowadays have become great challenges for medical community. Just for the reasonthat heart disease is characterized by burstiness and long-term, it is essential for us to monitorheart activity in the long term.ECG signal is a kind of electrophysiology signal that contains a great quantity ofphysiological information of heart. ECG is an important tool used by to diagnose heartdisease because of easy accessibility and easy observation. Therefore, a suit of ECGequipment which is featured by real-time and high efficiency is very important for diagnosisof heart disease. Intact information of heart activity will be sent to help doctors to diagnoseand cure heart disease in time following real-time, high-precision ECG acquisition.The research in this paper is mainly to design a suit of ECG acquisition module with thefeature of high performance and high flexibility. This module is not only able to complete theacquisition and processing of ECG devices usually and is highly scalable. The overallframework of this module is described as embedded micro-controller based on Cortex-M3combined with programmable logic devices (FPGA). The structure gives full play to theadvantages of microcontroller in control field and FPGA in logic implementation and digitalsignal processing.Application verification towards ECG acquisition module has great significance in thispaper. This module will be checked according to national standard on electrocardiograph andECG monitor in order that it can be applied clinically.