An Efficient Approach for Denoising ECG Signal using 4-Tap FIR Filter

Electrocardiogram signal is used to analyze the electrical activity of heart. The ECG signals can be used to identify some type of heart diseases and cardiac efficiency. During acquisition of the signal, it is contaminated with various types of noises. It is essential to remove noise from the signal for correct diagnosis of heart disorder. Low pass FIR filter is implemented to remove high frequency noise from the ECG signal. To eliminate noise, the signal is passed through 4-Tap direct form-lowpass FIR filter. The coefficients of filter are floating point numbers. Therefore, the filter is designed to accept floating point values to minimize the error. The filter is implemented in Verilog and performance (area, power, delay) of the design is evaluated using Xilinx 14.2. This approach is carried out in the FPGA unit (spartan 3E). Performance of the filter is evaluated using metrics like Mean square error and Signal to noise ratio.