Design and implementation of Digital FIR Equiripple Notch Filter on ECG Signal for removal of Power line Interference

Filtering of power line interference is very meaningful in the measurement of biomedical events recording, particularly in the case of recording signals as weak as the ECG. The available filters for power line interference either need a reference channel or regard the frequency as fixed 50/60Hz. Methods of noise reduction have decisive influence on performance of all electro-cardio-graphic (ECG) signal processing systems. This work deals with problems of power line interference reduction. In the literature of the last twenty years several solutions of removal of power line interference on electrocardiogram (ECG) signals can be found. Some analogue and digital approaches to this problem are presented and its properties, advantages and disadvantages are shown. Present paper deals with design and development of digital FIR equiripple filter. The basic ECG has the frequency range from .5Hz to 100Hz. Artifacts plays the vital role in the processing of the ECG signal. It becomes difficult for the Specialist to diagnose the diseases if the artifacts are present in the ECG signal. In the present work notch filter is designed and applied to the ECG signal containing power line noise. Complete design is performed with FDA tool in the Matlab. The equiripple notch filter designed is having higher order due to which increase in the computational complexity observed. For accessing real time ECG the related instrumentation has been developed in the laboratory. The result shows the ECG signal before filtering and after filtering with their frequency spectrums which clearly indicates the reduction of the power line interference in the ECG signal.