Removal of Wandering Baseline Artifact from Electrocardiogram Signals

In this research, we analyze a very common issue called wandering baseline artifact (WBA) that has with electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. This artifact is due to normal patient's movements and is present on each derivation. This wandering baseline has a very low frequency, normally under 0.2 Hz. The wandering baseline on the ECG signals produce an alteration on the `P' segment (the information of the atrial depolarization) and the `ST' segment (the information of a ventricular contraction). We have developed the linear filter that has used to remove this WBA by keeping the nature of the original ECG signals and making sure not to vanish clinical important information from the original signals. In this research, we used ECG signals provided by the Physionet, which is a database website that provide physiological signals for research purposes. The filters (median and moving average) that used in the proposed algorithm is to obtain the signal that we do not want from our original signal. Finally, we do a subtraction between the original signal and the filtered signal and analyze both signals (input and output) in the frequency domain using the Welch Periodogram that indicate the reduction of wandering baseline since the power density spectrum decrease among low frequencies.