Date of Graduation

8-2013

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Electrical Engineering

Advisor/Mentor

Varadan, Vijay K.

Committee Member

Brown, Randy L.

Second Committee Member

Costello, Thomas A.

Third Committee Member

Chen, Linfeng

Keywords

Applied sciences; Adaptive filter; Ambulatory women; ECG; E-Bra systems; Motion artifact

Abstract

Cardio Vascular Disease (CVD) leads to sudden cardiac death due to irregular phenomenon of the cardiac signal by the abnormal case of blood vessel and cardiac structure. For last three decades, there is an enhanced interest in research for cardiac diseases.. As a result, the death rate by cardiac disease in men has been falling gradually compared with relatively increasing the death rate for women due to CVD. The main reason for this phenomenon is due to the lack of seriousness to female CVD and different symptoms of female CVD compared with the symptoms of male CVD. Usually, because the CVDs for women accompany with ordinary symptoms not attributable to the heart abnormality signal such as unusual fatigue, sleep disturbances, shortness of breath, anxiety, chest discomfort, and indigestion dyspepsia, most women CVD patients do not realize that these symptoms are actually related to the CVD symptoms. Therefore, periodic ECG signal observation is required not only for women who have been diagnosed with heart disease but also for persons who want to examine their heart activity. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is used to diagnose abnormality of heart. Among the medical checkup methods for CVDs, it is very an effective method for the diagnosis of cardiac disease and the early detection of heart abnormality to monitor ECG periodically. This dissertation proposes an effective ECG monitoring system for woman by attaching the system on woman's brassiere by using augmented chest lead attachment method. The suggested system called "E-Bra system" in this dissertation consists of an ECG transmission system and a computer installed program called "E-Bra pro" in order to display and analyze the ECG transmitted from the transmission module. The ECG transmission module consists of three parts such as ECG physical signal detection part with 3 stage amplifier and two electrodes, data acquisition with AD converter, and data transmission part with GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) communication, and it has very compact size that is attachable at the bottom layer of a brassiere for women. However, the ECG signal measured from the transmission module includes not only pure ECG components information; P waves QRS complex, and T wave, but also a motion artifact component (MA) due to subject movements. The MA component is one of the reasons for misdiagnosis. Therefore, the main purpose of the E-Bra system is to provide a reliable ECG data set identical to the quality of an ECG data set collected in hospital. Unfortunately, removing MA is a big challenge because the frequency range of the MA is duplicated on the frequency range of the pure ECG components, P-QRS-T. In this dissertation, two motion artifact removal algorithms (MARAs) with adaptive filter structure and independent component analysis concept are suggested, and the performance of the two MARAs will be evaluated by correlation values and signal noise ratio (SNR) values.

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