DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A SINGLE CHANNEL ECG MONITOR USING PC

ABSTRACTAn Electro-Cardio-Graph (ECG) is a device that records the electricalactivity of the heart. Skin electrodes placed at designated locations on the bodycollect ECG measurement information, and from these waveforms differentinformation on heart condition can be derived.This paper discusses the design and implementation of a single-channel ECG(three-electrode) circuit with a bandwidth of (0.5-100) Hz for patient monitoringpurposes. The front end of an ECG must be able to deal with weak signals rangingfrom few microvolts to few millivolts. An analogue ECG amplifier is designed andimplemented using instrumentation amplifier (IA) followed by band pass filter(BPF), then by notch filter (NF) to minimize noise affecting the signal, and a rightleg drive circuit (RLDC). .The ECG data is recorded and analyzed with greater flexibility using personalcomputer. The (ALS 4000) PC-sound card is used as a data acquisition device. TheMatlab program (version 6.5) is employed to acquire data from sound card thendigitally processing the signal in order to display the ECG signal on a PC monitor.