An FPGA-based implementation of a pre-processing stage for ECG signal analysis using DWT

This paper falls within the scope of implementation of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) algorithms in the state of the art Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA); so, it presents an FPGA-based embedded system design and its evaluation for a pre-processing stage of ECG signal analysis; such a design uses the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) approach. Thus, the system deals mainly with the baseline wander (BLW) removal and the QRS detection. As the DWT-based implementation requires important hardware resources, our system is designed, in a spirit of optimization, to fit in low-cost and low-power FPGA device for portable medical equipment. It is developed with the Xilinx design tool, System Generator for DSP which is a plug-in to Simulink. This hardware design is tested with ECG data records from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. By a careful visual examination of the simulation results, we report that the whole design provides a good response especially for the part of BLW suppression; moreover, only this part concerning the BLW is tested with a JTAG Hardware co-simulation in the available board at the time of experimentation, that is the Nexys 3 board of Digilent featuring Xilinx SPARTAN 6 XC6SLX16.