Low-Cost and Low-Complexity Electrocardiogram Signal Recorder Design Based on Arduino Platform

This paper presents an acquisition circuit design integrated with commercial ICs and platform is built for the development of long-term ECG monitor. An efficient DCT-IV-based ECG compression algorithm with a higher Quality Score (QS) and a better Compressing Ratio (CR) is further embedded to reduce a great number of recording data in storage and transmission. To fairly evaluate the performance of the proposed compressing algorithm, the ECG signals sourced from MIT-BIT arrhythmia database with a sampling rate of 360 Hz are employed to be the test patterns. The simulation results show that the averages of CR, Percent RMS Difference (PRD), and QS are, respectively, 5.267, 0.187, and 28.223 for all 48 lead-V1 patterns of MIT-BIH database. Compared with the Lee et al.'s algorithm, the QS value of the proposed method has a great improvement by 25%. Finally, we successfully combine the above works into a system and make a detailed comparison with state-of-the-art approach. The experiment results clearly show that the proposed system would be a better choice for realizing ECG signal acquisition in the future.