Analog Front End and FPGA Based Soft IP Core for ECG Logger

This chapter presents an FPGA-based ECG system with telemonitoring facility. There are several methods of recording and transmitting ECG signals. A classical recording in health centers, then ambulatory ECG recordings and tele­metry monitoring the patient in and round medical center. The system presented in this chapter has a provision to transmit the ECG data through the serial modem for diagnosis by the expert cardiologist. In order to facilitate this, a communication protocol is designed and implemented in VHDL. The objective of this work was to study a modem based transmission of the ECG using telephone lines. Using this system the ECG of the patients was successfully transmitted to the expert medical professionals for immediate diagnosis. The design is implemented on a Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA. The extent of the resources used indicates plenty of room for incorporating additional functionality which has been integrated and described elsewhere by the authors [96]. The system implemented here used with the control monitor center having trained medical staff could enable round the clock monitoring of few thousands of patients. With pre-paid service the patients might get the economical benefits and efficient way of monitoring than with classical recording of the ECG signal.