A Soft Processor MicroBlaze-Based Embedded System for Cardiac Monitoring

Abstract

Abstract-this paper aims to contribute to the efforts of design community to demonstrate the effectiveness of the state of the art Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), in the embedded systems development, taking a case study in the biomedical field. With this design approach, we have developed a System on Chip (SoC) for cardiac monitoring based on the soft processor MicroBlaze and the Xilkernel Real Time Operating System (RTOS), both from Xilinx. The system permits the acquisition and the digitizing of the Electrocardiogram (ECG) analog signal, displaying heart rate on seven segments module and ECG on Video Graphics Adapter (VGA) screen, tracing the heart rate variability (HRV) tachogram, and communication with a Personal Computer (PC) via the serial port. We have used the MIT_BIH Database records to test and evaluate our implementation performance. In terms of the resources utilization, the implementation occupies around 70% of the used FPGA, namely the Xilinx Spartan 6 XC6SLX16. The accuracy of the QRS detection exceeds 96%.