Design of digital FIR filter implemented with window techniques for reduction of power line interference from ECG signal

Present paper deals with design and development of digital FIR filters. Heart diseases, which are one of the death reasons, are among the several serious problems in this century and as per the latest survey, 60% of the patients die due to Heart diseases. Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal plays a vital role in the monitoring and diagnosis of the health conditions of human heart. The basic ECG signal has the frequency range from .5Hz to 100Hz. The most significant noises that corrupt ECG signal are power line interference and baseline wanders. It becomes difficult for the Specialist to diagnose the diseases if artifacts are present in the ECG signal. Designing digital filters to reduce these noises is very important in ECG signal processing. In this work a digital FIR filter for reducing 50Hz power line noise in ECG signal is designed and implemented with different windowing methods as of Hamming, Kaiser, and Chebyshev. The work has been done in MATLAB environment. The result obtained for all FIR filters are compared by comparing the waveforms of the original and filtered ECG signals. The filter which gives the best results is the one using Chebyshev Window.