A low power ECG signal processor for ambulatory arrhythmia monitoring system

An ECG signal processor (ESP) is proposed for ambulatory arrhythmia monitoring systems. The ESP consists of three heterogeneous processors and performs filtering, data compression, ECG classification, and encryption. A data reduction scheme, consisting of skeleton and Huffman coding, are employed to reduce the on-chip memory capacity and memory access power. Clock gating and voltage scaling are also applied to reduce the power consumption. The ESP consumes 1.26-μW at 0.7V, while providing real time signal processing.