Design of ECG Signal Analysis Module for Arrhythmia Detection and Its Implementation on FPGA

Electrocardiogram is an important tool in diagnosing the condition of the heart. Extracting the information from the Electrocardiogram is an important task in determining the variations of the electrical activity of the heart. ECG feature extraction plays a major significant role in diagnosing the most of the cardiac diseases. One among the major cardiac diseases is arrhythmia which is abrupt and abnormal heart beat. In case of arrhythmia heart doesn’t pump sufficient blood required for the human body and sudden cardiac death may happen and this can even damage vital organs such as brain, heart, etc. of the body. So it is very much needed to determine conditions of arrhythmia and should take necessary measure before the patient reaches some serious condition. Hence in order to find out arrhythmia ECG signal should be analyzed. Main focus in analyzing the ECG signal involves in finding QRS complex and identifying time and frequency variations. By comparing these with variations in the normal ECG waveform it is possible to conclusion whether the patient is suffering from arrhythmia or not. Results have been verified using a combination of Xilinx and Modelsim softwares.