Motion artifacts extraction using dwt from ambulatory ECG (A-ECG)

Ambulatory ECG signal monitoring is useful when long term cardiac monitoring of a patient is necessary. Ambulatory ECG (A-ECG) monitoring provides electrical activity of the heart while a person is involved in doing his or her normal routine activities. Thus, the recorded ECG signal consists of cardiac signal along with motion artifacts introduced due to person´s body movements during routine activities. This motion artifact has spectral overlap with cardiac signal in 1-10 Hz which corresponds to ECG features like P wave and T wave. Detection of motion artifacts due to different physical activities (PA) might help in further cardiac diagnosis. Ambulatory ECG signal analysis for detection of various motion artifacts using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) approach is addressed in this paper. The ECG signals of healthy subjects (aged of 19 to 16 years) were recorded while the person performs various body movements activity like (i) up and down movement of left hand, (ii) up and down movement of right hand, (iii) waist twisting movement while standing and (iv) change in position from sitting down on chair to standing up movement in lead I configuration by using BIOPAC MP 36 signal acquiring system.