Portable ECG Display: An Experiential Learning through a Senior Design Project

This paper presents the case of a senior design project conducted by students who took the communication and signal processing track. The objective of the project was to design and implement a portable ECG display. This project employed the Arduino microcontroller and Duinopeak ECG Shield. The shield consisted of an instrumentation amplifier, a set of filters and signal conditioning circuits. The signal from the ECG Shield was sent to Arduino microcontroller for the analog to digital conversion. The analog ECG signal was transformed to digital data for signal processing and the heart rate calculation. The heart rate and ECG waveform were displayed on the target screen. The portable ECG display was capable of displaying heart rate and ECG waveform as designed. The heart rate reading accuracy was within 1.267%. The implemented software set was able to read, write and display ECG waveform on the target device. This project was an excellent learning experience. Further, it was found that this kind of project would be a very relevant senior design project for students interested in medical instrumentation. The preliminary design, intermediate design and after-benchmarked design could be viewed as repeated experiential learning cycles. Continuous use of the learning cycle guides individuals and groups towards improved performance and high quality outcomes. The more students use the experiential learning cycle, the more they will gain continuous improvement.