Design of a Real-Time ECG Filter for Portable Mobile Medical Systems

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is a direct and effective way to find cardiovascular disease timely, which can intuitively reflect changes of the heart beat and activities of different parts. Due to the noise interference from surroundings, acquisition of real-time and high-quality ECG signal is a big challenge for portable mobile medical systems. Integer coefficients infinite impulse response (IIR) digital filter is suitable for portable mobile platform, but it will be a little bit of distortion. So, an improved integer IIR filter for portable ECG monitors is presented in this paper. The proposed IIR filter can instantaneously and effectively eliminate baseline drift of main interference frequency band and 50-Hz power frequency interference in ECG signal. The method is verified by a specific example and MIT/BIH Arrhythmia Database. The improved integer coefficients IIR filter was applied in a portable mobile medical system. It can meet the requirements of ECG filtering in real-time and filtering performance.