Towards a smart Holter system with high performance analogue front-end and enhanced digital processing

Multiple-lead dynamic ECG recorders (Holter) play an important role in the earlier detection of various cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, we present the first several steps towards a 12-lead Holter system with high-performance AFE (Analogue Front-End) and enhanced digital processing. The system incorporates an analogue front-end chip (ADS1298 from TI), which has not yet been widely used in most commercial Holter products. A highly-efficient data management module was designated to handle the data exchange between the ADS1298 and the microprocessor (STM32L151 from ST electronics). Furthermore, the system employs a Field Programmable Gate Array (Spartan-3E from Xilinx) module, on which a dedicated real-time 227-step FIR filter was executed to improve the overall filtering performance, since the ADS1298 has no high-pass filtering capability and only allows limited low-pass filtering. The Spartan-3E FPGA is also capable of offering further on-board computational ability for a smarter Holter. The results indicate that all functional blocks work as intended. In the future, we will conduct clinical trials and compare our system with other state-of-the-arts.