Advanced ECG processor with HRV analysis for real-time portable health monitoring

In this paper, a portable ECG processor designed for health monitoring applications is proposed. The ECG processor acquires three-channel ECG raw data through a front-end circuit, and measures the time between successive heart beats on lead II as RR intervals for heart rate variability (HRV) analysis. Functions such as R-peak detection, RR interval calculation, sliding memory window scheme, and time-frequency analysis of HRV have also been developed. A real-time HRV analysis processor is realized by employing a Lomb periodogram for time-frequency power spectral density (PSD) analysis of the heart rate. The Lomb time-frequency distribution (TFD) is suited for deriving the PSD of unevenly spaced data sets. The system has been implemented in hardware and verified on FPGA.