Hardware emulation of ECG sensors for biomedical embedded system design and teaching

Research on wearable systems able to automatically analyze ECG signals is fundamental for the successful inclusion of ambulatory patient monitoring in the health system. The design of such systems can be highly benefited by the use of sensor emulators based on low-cost, low-size embedded systems.In this paper a hardware emulator able to realistically mimic the behaviour of an ECG sensor is presented. A thorough analysis of ECG data is performed in order to obtain an accurate model of the main ECG parameters, including heart rate variability and bias wandering.The emulator is implemented allowing the configuration of the different ECG parameters and then tested with an embedded system able to detect heart beats in real-time.