Low-cost prototype design of a portable ECG signal recorder

This paper presents an acquisition system design integrated with the Arduino Nano platform and commercial ICs for the prototype development of a portable ECG signal monitor. A simply lossless ECG compression algorithm with a better Compression Ratio (CR) is employed to reduce a great amount of storage and transmission recording data. The result proves that the CR averages are 2.53 for ECG test patterns from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The experimental result also shows a pure ECG signal can be easily acquired by using a 16-tap low-pass digital filter. Therefore, the proposed design would be a good choice for the application of ECG signal acquisition in the future.