ElectroCardioGram (ECG) signals are usually corrupted with various types of noise/artifacts such as baseline wander and muscle contraction artifacts which degrade the signal quality and might lead to misdiagnosis of the patient. The wavelet denoising technique is widely studied in the artifact removal literature which employs conventional Finite Impulse Response (FIR) wavelet filter banks for decomposing, thresholding and reconstructing the noisy signal to obtain high fidelity and clean ECG signal. However, the use of high order FIR wavelet filters increases the hardware complexity and cost of the system. This paper presents novel hybrid Infinite Impulse Response (IIR)/FIR Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) filter banks that can be employed in ambulatory health monitoring applications for denoising purposes. The proposed systems are evaluated and compared to the conventional FIR based DWT systems in terms of the computational complexity as well as the denoising performance. For this purpose, raw ECG data from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database are contaminated with synthetic noise and denoised with the aforementioned filter banks. The results from 100 Monte Carlo simulations demonstrated that the proposed filter banks provide better denoising performance with fewer arithmetic operations than those reported in the open literature.

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This paper is based on the novel use of a very high fidelity decimation filter chain for Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal acquisition and data conversion. The multiplier-free and multi-stage structure of the proposed filters lower the power dissipation while minimizing the circuit area which are crucial design constraints to the wireless noninvasive wearable health monitoring products due to the scarce operational resources in their electronic implementation. The decimation ratio of the presented filter is 128, working in tandem with a 1-bit 3 rd order Sigma Delta (ΣΔ) modulator which achieves 0.04 dB passband ripples and -74 dB stopband attenuation. The work reported here investigates the non-linear phase effects of the proposed decimation filters on the ECG signal by carrying out a comparative study after phase correction. It concludes that the enhanced phase linearity is not crucial for ECG acquisition and data conversion applications since the signal distortion of the acquired signal, due to phase non-linearity, is insignificant for both original and phase compensated filters. To the best of the authors' knowledge, being free of signal distortion is essential as this might lead to misdiagnosis as stated in the state of the art. This article demonstrates that with their minimal power consumption and minimal signal distortion features, the proposed decimation filters can effectively be employed in biosignal data processing units.

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obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners.Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). Abstract-Due to an increasing demand for on-sensor biosignal processing in wireless ambulatory applications, it is crucial to reduce the power consumption and hardware cost of the signal processing units. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is very popular tool in artifact removal, detection and compression for time-frequency analysis of biosignals and can be implemented as two-branch filter bank. This work proposes a new, completely multiplier free filter architecture for implementing Daubechies wavelets which targets Field-Programmable-Gate-Array (FPGA) technologies by replacing multipliers with Reconfigurable Multiplier Blocks (ReMBs). The results have shown that the proposed technique reduces the hardware complexity by 40% in terms of Look-Up Table (LUT) count and can be used in low-cost embedded platforms for ambulatory physiological signal monitoring and analysis.