FPGA-based peak detection of ECG signal using histogram approach

The heart is the most vital organ of the human body. Its diagnosis is done by a very old-school method called Electrocardiogram (ECG). This paper proposes a simple method to detect and identify the R peak, P peak and the T peaks from a noise free ECG signal. This is achieved with the help of histogram based algorithm, which has been applied on MIT-BIH noise stress test database obtained from physio.net. The method has been chosen as it does not involve any complex mathematical model. The algorithm has been implemented and tested in MATLAB for initial testing. It has been further implemented in Field-programmable gate array (FPGA), VIRTEX-5 device as hardware platform. Xilinx 14.7 ISE design suite with VHDL RTL coding has been used for peak detection and identification purpose. The performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated and compared against previous implementations.