ABSTRACT

Care of critically ill patient, requires spontaneous & accurate decisions so that life-protecting &
lifesaving therapy can be properly applied. Statistics reveals that every minute a human is losing
his/her life across the globe. More close in India, everyday many lives are affected by heart
attacks and more importantly because the patients did not get timely and proper help. Hence, we
thought of designing the real time ECG monitoring system, using Advanced RISC Machine-9
(ARM9), which is highly reliable and portable. The purpose of choosing this platform is that we
can use it in normal mobile phones, which gives ultimate usage of the prototype.
The development tool used is FriendlyARM-MINI2440, using LINUX operating system. LINUX
is open source. The mini2440 is an efficient, a practical lowcost ARM9 Single Board Computer
(SBC) with a very high performance/cost ratio. For the acquisition purpose we are using a
module which contains sensors for ECG acquisition as well as the circuit to amplify acquired
signals.
We can conclude that we are able to monitor the data in real time which is sensed from patient.
Usage of module has proven to be advantageous as it is integrating the 3 channel data and
sending through a single channel. Also amplification is taking place in module itself.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1-Introduction

1.1 Problem statement

1.2 Why real-time ECG monitoring using arm technology

1.3 Different form ARM Cores
1.4 Objectives

Chapter 2- Background and Literature review

2.1 Electrocardiography

2.2 Literature review

2.2.1 Explorations of bioelectricity and electricity generated by heart

2.2.2 The Einthoven string galvanometer

2.2.3 ECG recording and amplification

10

2.2.4 ECG in the era of Microelectronics

10

Chapter 3- Methodology and materials

12

3.1 Implementation phases 12

3.2 Project design 12
3.2.1 Hardware design

13

3.2.2 Software design 18

Chapter 4- Implementation 23
4.1 Initialization of ARM9 board 23
4.1.1 Introduction

23

4.1.2 Boot loader

23

4.1.3 Loading kernel image 24

4.1.4 Installing file system

25

4.4.5 Loading application files

4.1.6 QT Creator

27

27

Chapter 5- Results

30

Chapter 6- Conclusion and future improvements

6.1 Conclusion

33

6.2 Future Improvements 33

References

35

Appendix

36

33

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure

2.1 Typical ECG waveform........................................................................

6
Figure

2.1.2 Generation of ECG signal.................................................................

6
Figure

2.2.2 Einthoven string galvanometer.........................................................

9
Figure

3.2.1 Internal circuit of module and sensors...............................................

13
Figure

3.2.2 Physical appearance of MINI2440....................................................

14
Figure

3.2.3 Minicom2440 board peripherals.......................................................

15
Figure

3.2.4 Schematic of ADC............................................................................

16
Figure

3.2.5 Schematic of LCD............................................................................

17
Figure

4.1 Supervivi main menu...........................................................................

24
Figure

4.2 Selection of download LINUX from menu...........................................

25
Figure
26

4.3 Selection of Download root_yaffs image option from menu ..............

Figure

4.4 Download Status of Linux File System into NOR Flash .....................

26
Figure

4.5 Appearance of Qt Creator ....................................................................

28
Figure

5.1 ECG signal on desktop monitor ............................................................

31
Figure
31

5.2 ECG signal on LCD .............................................................................