On-board touch screen graphical interface design for SoC-based arrhythmia detector

Heart monitoring system is a device to carry out electrocardiogram (ECG) test. It can diagnose human´s heart either in normal or abnormal condition based on ECG analysis. However, most of the current ECG device is bulky, expensive and lack of a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for user interaction. This paper describes an on-board GUI design based on capacitive touch-screen Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) display. It is integrated with the in-house design of ECG processing unit and arrhythmia classifier to form a complete System-on-Chip (SoC) based arrhythmia detector. The whole system is implemented on the Altera Video and Embedded Evaluation Kit with Multi-Touch (VEEK-MT) FPGA development board. The touch screen GUI acts as a front-end menu to capture user input and retrieve the offline ECG data stored in external SD card, as well as back-end result display in terms of arrhythmia classification result, ECG raw signal display, and R-R interval. Prototyping result shows that this system is light-weight, cost-effective and suitable to be user for different groups of user according to their knowledge background, including patient, nurse, physician and cardiologist.