FPGA Design of ECG-SoC System for the Analysis of ECG Applicable for Rural Health Care Centers

Abstract

Abstract: Today, seventy percent of Indians still live in poor conditions in rural areas. Those who live in rural regions have fewer alternatives available to them in nursing care and medical diagnostics since there are only a few institutions equipped with modern medical technology. This situation reduces the number of choices available to them. As a direct consequence of lack of medical facilities, the rural residents do not find enough access to medical treatment.  From this perspective, the use of cutting-edge technology to the treatment of their various health problems could prove to be advantageous.

 In this work, it is proposed that the design and implementation of an ECG-SoC system for the analysis of ECG is applicable to rural health care centers. This system is designed to meet the needs of rural communities. Electrocardiogram (ECG) pre-processing and heart rate variability (HRV) feature extraction are two of the numerous operations that it can do; both the features are appropriate for use in applications pertaining to remote health care. The ECG-SoC was developed by employing a technique known as hardware/software co-design, utilizing an offline dataset obtained from the MIT-BIH database. The design of the system prototype and the testing of the system's functionality both made use of an Altera Cyclone II DE2-115 FPGA platform. Both the processes were carried out to ensure the system's integrity. The results of the computation are shown on the Nios II-Linux terminal, and the task of creating output files for post-processing on the Nios II-Linux terminal appears on the personal computer that is serving as the host.

The findings of this research indicate "that the ECG-SoC system developed is capable of performing power spectrum analysis in addition to compiling a raw ECG dataset, detecting QRS, computing R-R intervals, and presenting the FFT output". It is demonstrated that the system can perform these tasks. In addition to this, it can carry out all these activities at the same time. The strategy that has been outlined here will not only bring about a general reduction in the cost of receiving medical care in rural regions, but it will also bring about a lessening in the severity of cardiovascular diseases

Index Terms: Electrocardiography (ECG), ECG-SoC System, HRV Feature extraction, cardiovascular diseases