An appendix to embedded designs of QRS detectors

The Wavelet Transform in its discrete form has been widely applied in the field of biomedical signals. Typically, its calculation is performed off-line and calculation systems usually suffer from limited autonomy, bulkiness and obtrusiveness. A noticeable surge in industrial, research and academic interest into telemedicine and medical embedded systems, has been happening recently, where miniature, low-cost, autonomous and ultra-low-power devices play a major role. Such devices are usually based on Microcontrollers (MCs) or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and in addition to other tasks they need to perform signal processing, very often in real-time. This paper presents a methodology to perform on-line QRS detector on MC´s and FPGA´s platforms. After the theoretical considerations on wavelets and their optimization in term of integer arithmetic, the computation architectures for both technologies are described. At the end, the presentation of obtained results during intensive tests on real signals is given. Similar approach can be applied to other signals, where the embedded implementation of wavelets can be of a benefit.