Design of heart rate variability processor for portable 3-lead ECG monitoring system-on-chip

The worldwide population of people over the age of 65 has been predicted to more than double from 1990 to 2025. Therefore, ubiquitous health-care systems have become an important topic of research in recent years. In this paper, an integrated system for portable electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring, with an on-board processor for time–frequency analysis of heart rate variability (HRV), is presented. The main function of proposed system comprises three parts, namely, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) controller, an HRV processor, and a lossless compression engine. At the beginning, ECG data acquired from front-end circuits through the ADC controller is passed through the HRV processor for analysis. Next, the HRV processor performs real-time analysis of time–frequency HRV using the Lomb periodogram and a sliding window configuration. The Lomb periodogram is suited for spectral analysis of unevenly sampled data and has been applied to time–frequency analysis of HRV in the proposed system. Finally, the ECG data are compressed by 2.5 times using the lossless compression engine before output using universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART). Bluetooth is employed to transmit analyzed HRV data and raw ECG data to a remote station for display or further analysis. The integrated ECG health-care system design proposed has been implemented using UMC 90 nm CMOS technology. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.