A MicroBlaze-based Multiprocessor System on Chip for real-time cardiac monitoring

Design, Fabrication, and Testing of an IoT Healthcare Cardiac Monitoring Device

“…The project detailed in [8] presents an implementation based on FPGA for the real-time monitoring of cardiac patients. This project used a SPARTAN-6 XC6SLX16 FPGA circuit and the MicroBlaze processor provided by Xilinx.…”

“…The MB0 processor was implemented for the real-time collection of data from electrodes situated on the patient's body; MB1 was the second processor implemented in FPGA, which executed tasks that did not require a real-time response; MB2 controlled and coordinated the MB0 and MB1 slave processors through special functions dedicated to the inter-processor communication FSL interface (transmitting data-putfsl(date, id) and receiving data-getfsl(date, id)). For more detailed information on the connections between these three processors, see the graphic description in the article [8]. The resources needed to implement this project were only 94% of the FPGAs Xilinx Spartan-6 XC6SLX16's resources, because the system was optimized through the hardware/software CoDesign techniques.…”

“…On the other hand, the authors argue that they can determine the size of the jitter buffer needed to avoid service dropouts due to buffer underflows, thereby ensuring increased reliability in ECG monitoring. In comparison to the implementations based on FPGA [8] that improve real-time features via the hardware parallelization of the application's tasks, the Telecare-ECG Monitor project described in the present paper is favored due to the designing and debugging tools provided by the Keil uVision 5 development software, the implementation concept of the IoT Healthcare system, and the ADAS1000 circuit from Analog Devices. However, the Telecare-ECG Monitor embedded system was not only designed as a portable device for out-of-hospital cardiac patients.…”

“…If the ECG is properly executed, it sends an EVT_EXE_EKG_ LOGG_NEW_JOB event for the history task to save the ECG as an ASCII file on the SD card. Compared to similar projects in the literature [8], the Telecare-ECG Monitoring device saves the ECG data on a microSD memory card, where it can be retrieved later if there is no functional communication when the ECG is performed. Using the STM32F107 microcontroller adds extra performance to the system because, besides its flexibility, it also ensures low power consumption.…”

Implementation of an algorithm for heart rate measurement in a specialized multi-core processor

“…Solutions making use of general-purpose microprocessors, e.g. 68HC16 [4] or soft processors: MicroBlaze [5] from Xilinx and Nios II [6] from Altera are known. Article [7] presents custom-made cores described in VHDL and based on PIC24 Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) from Microchip.…”