Design of high performance QRS complex detector for wearable healthcare devices using biorthogonal spline wavelet transform

A high performance QRS complex detector applicable for wearable healthcare devices is proposed in the present work. Since, higher SNR results in better detection accuracy and lesser number of coefficients reduces the hardware resources as well as power dissipation during on chip implementation. Biorthogonal spline wavelet transform is chosen for the proposed detector as it has high signal to noise ratio (SNR) and uses only four coefficients for decomposition. In the proposed approach, a Biorthogonal wavelet filter bank with fourth level decomposition is first used to separate the different frequency components and then a fourth level wavelet filter bank is used to get the denoised electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Wavelet filter bank outputs are multiplied and soft threshold method is applied to get the QRS complex peaks by the QRS complex peak detector block. Add and shift multiplier used in the earlier designs has been replaced by a Booth multiplier in our approach to achieve the higher performance. Booth multiplier and QRS complex peak detector blocks have been designed for low hardware complexity, high performance and accurate detection of the QRS complex peaks. Time interval between the consecutive QRS peaks is calculated using the R-R peak time calculator block and the heart rate (HR) by the HR calculator block. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and arrhythmia are detected based on these heart rate calculations. Proposed design has been tested for its robustness on multiple datasets (namely, MIT-BIH arrhythmia, MIT-BIH noise stress test, and MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation databases). Sensitivity of 99.31%, positive predictivity of 99.19% and the Detection Error Rate (DER) of 1.49% shown by the proposed design makes it preferable for QRS complex detectors used in wearable healthcare devices.