How to Develop a Single Channel Electrocardiograph with a Low Budget

This paper shows the design and construction of an electrocardi-ograph capable of capturing and showing the electrical activity of the human heart through a single channel. For this purpose, a circuit comprising an amplification phase, that uses an instru-mentation amplifier (INA), and an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is designed and connected to a Raspberry Pi (RPI) micro-computer through a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). In addi-tion, a software, responsible for the cardiac signal acquisition, storage and visualization was written in Python programming language and executed in the microcomputer. The obtained sig-nals were analyzed by software GNU/Octave, where digital signal processing techniques (PDS) were employed in the development of filters. With the prototype, it was possible to observe the main waves that compose the Electrocardiogram, in agreement with the expected signal for the bipolar DI peripheral derivation, where the measurement points are located in both arms.