Wireless ECG Device

The aim of this project was to create a wireless wearable ECG device that allows continuous monitoring of a patient with the detection and prediction of arrhythmic heartbeats in them.

This project was explored in 2 phases. In phase 1, I tried to build a basic ECG device with the idea to make parts of it wireless eventually. I have learnt how to build op-amp circuits for ECG.While building them, I found that the ECG signals obtained by the user are in millivolts that needs high precision filtering and amplification. Also, ECG is computed as a different in the signals at 2 ‘leads’ at a time. In order to make this wireless, we are required to set the voltage levels at each lead to be exactly equal. This was extremely difficult to establish.

In phase 2, we have obtained a wireless ECG device from a startup that have minimized the form factor of the ECG into a 15 cm x 8 cm x 5 cm hand-held box which transmits the ascuired ECG via wifi to a computer. My team has processed the acquired ECG signals to find ECG patterns that can be classified into arrhythmia and healthy. We have discovered that the QRS amplitude, RR duration, P-wave and T-wave length and heights were distinct for each subject. These patterns can be used to identify the patient based on their ECG. We concluded that these kind of patterns can be extracted to classify between arrhythmic and healthy ECGs.

Our work was published in the International Conference for Advanced Electronic Systems (ICAES)-2013. The paper can be accessed at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6659399