R-READER: A lightweight algorithm for rapid detection of ECG signal R-peaks

ECG analysis represents a key way of determining the condition of a patient´s heart and the accurate detection of the R-peak in the QRS complex of an ECG signal is one of the most important steps for proper diagnosis. In this paper we present R-READER: a Rapid-Ramp Effective Algorithm for Detection of ECG R-peaks; it uses the slopes between adjacent signals to determine the occurrence of the R-peak in effective way that obviates the resource and latency problems of many existing techniques. We have used some extreme ECG signal cases from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database and compared our R-READER with the hardware implementation of the Pan & Tompkin´s algorithm and the modified combination of the So & Chan and the Tompkin´s algorithm. We got an average accuracy of 96.614%, compared to 94.467% and 77.930% respectively for the other algorithms at a fraction of the latency and resource demands.