The design of a power-efficient 12-ch ECG ambulatory recorder

Abstract

          The ambulatory ECG test so called Holter is widely performed to diagnose several heart diseases that cause different arrhythmia. This research presented the design of a power-efficient 12-ch ECG ambulatory recorder. Reducing the size and minimizing the power consumption of the ECG recorder played a critical role in increasing its usability with longer recording time without causing any discomfort to patient. To that end, various power saving techniques such as DMA transfer, efficient use of processor specific low power mode and data compression, etc. have been proposed in this paper. With the focus on reducing the power consumption of the acquisition system, our proposed techniques extend the recording time up to 72 hours. The performance test result of the proposed differentiated compression algorithm is also presented and discussed. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed compression algorithm significantly improves overall battery life-time up to 3 times.