VLSI Implementation for Biological Sensing Application

Abstract

People are suffering from many critical diseases. Cardiovascular disease is one of them and it is a type of disease which increases the death rate. As a preventive measure a regular check-up of our body is necessary and automatic disease detection in early stage is very important. Many techniques and methods have been explored and implemented with still growing adaptations and researches to examine and evaluate the ECG signals on a beat-to-beat basis. Most of the research works rotate all over the arrhythmia classification, heart rate observation and blood pressure determination, which needs proper judgment of rhythm irregularity. Regular heart disease and diagnosis of other diseases is very cumbersome and time consuming process and to reduce such complexity there is a requirement to develop a single system for disease diagnosis which is based on the morphological characteristics of ECG and blood pressure measurement. newlineAt present no compact embedded system exists that uses ECG with other body parameters for efficient diagnosis of heart and other diseases. A novel system has been developed that is able to diagnose the heart disease in two stages, first stage includes processing and calculation of ECG parameter and then classifies the arrhythmia type (irregular heartbeat) using proposed algorithm and the disease is found in the second stage using the type of arrhythmia and some other symptoms of disease. The algorithm has been tested over MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. The computational complexity has been reduced using only low frequency sub-bands for feature extraction. A system has been designed using MATLAB followed by Hardware Description Language (Verilog) and implemented on FPGA. Its performance has then been successfully tested and verified. newlineThe system detects the diseases in advanced stage itself so that people will not reach the severe condition of their health and the designed system is fast enough to generate alarm in time so that proper preventive assistance can be made to patient.