The Development of an Exercise Monitor Prototype for the Detection of Arrhythmia Using the Virtual Instrumentation Capabilities of Labview

Abstract

<p>There is a growing and obvious need for exercise pulse monitors that not only register heart beats and record other data such as calories burned but also detect arrhythmias. Ideally, they should identify the type of arrhythmia as well. In the last fifteen years or so there has been an improvement in the quality and capacities of exercise pulse monitors; however with the improvement in the electronics and circuits and with the development of virtual instrumentation to test and develop instruments to a higher degree, the market would welcome an exercise pulse monitor with the above abilities. Therefore the purpose of this project is to construct a basic pulse monitor that can detect and identify five types of basic arrhythmias. The use of such products as LabVIEW in the area of virtual instrumentation to develop and test biomedical products has become a rapidly growing field. A search of technical electronic journals for virtual instrumentation identified over 2500 papers for a six year period. One of the reasons for this is that software products such as LabVIEW can significantly shorten the development time. The completed monitor in this project was developed using LabVIEW and the final testing was done with both simulated and real signals. A major feature of the final product is that it can be customized for a particular wearer. Although testing was not carried out with respect to this feature, it is to be assumed that if a wearer was prone to a certain type of arrhythmia that if that pattern was stored in the monitor, then there would be a greater chance of the arrhythmia being detected during an exercise period. The pulse monitor incorporates real time analysis which of course would be necessary since some arrhythmias develop quickly and can have immediate consequences. One of the reasons why such a pulse monitor could be successful is that the sampling rate that newer monitors are capable of is much higher than it was and also the features of LabVIEW allow for testing parameters that are very fast. The final monitor worked very satisfactorily. This bodes well for such a device being designed developed with significantly better accuracy and arrhythmia detecting capabilities.</p>