Motion artifact suppression in ambulatory ECG with feed forward combined adaptive filter

Ambulatory electrocardiogram (AECG) is widely used for heart disease diagnosis and treatment after surgery, but the signal quality will be negatively affected by the motion artifact (MA) coupling in the AECG signal. Adaptive filter (AF) has been used to suppress MA from AECG. Unfortunately, because of the non-stationary property of AECG and MA, the distortion and the artifact suppression performance of the AF's output cannot be satisfied simultaneously, resulting in a poor diagnosis, such as: low QRS beat detection accuracy. This paper proposes a new kind of AF: Feed Forward Combine AF (FFC-AF). It is composed by two separate AFs (one fast convergence speed AF `FCS-AF' and one high convergence accuracy AF `HCA-AF') and one combination parameter which varies with the estimation of reference signal stationary. The performance of FFC-AF is evaluated by distortion, signal artifact ratio and QRS beat detection accuracy.