Abstract—Digital filtering process is often necessary to suppress the noisy characteristics embedded in biomedical signals such as ECG (Electrocardiogram), EEG (Electroencephalogram), and EMG (Electromyogram). As the availability and usage levels of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) increases, the applications of ubiquitous healthcare are expected to be accelerated in the form of pervasive healthcare utilizing the mobile devices for the next decade. One of these aspects, ambulatory ECG signals can be transmitted to a mobile device to offer telecardiology healthcare delivery. However the signal is vulnerable to base-line drift and power-line source fluctuations. With this aim, the digital filtering algorithms are implemented with an android platform smartphone to eliminate the noisy components especially in the ECG signal transmitted wirelessly from the wearable patch-style heart activity monitoring system. Graphical User Interface (GUI) is designed and implemented in an Android OS smartphone with programming multi-thread-Java modules to realize FIR (Finite Impulse Response Filter) and IIR (Infinite Impulse Response Filter). With applying our implemented digital filters built in a mobile device, we can conclude the fact that the artifacts in the ambulatory ECG signal due to base-line wandering and power- line instability can be efficiently reduced.

Index Terms—electrocardiogram, smartphone, finite impulse response filter, infinite impulse response filter, graphic user interface, mobile healthcare

Cite: Jeong-Hwan Kim, Sang-Eun Park, Jeong-Whan Lee, and Kyeong-Seop Kim, "Design and Implementation of Digital Filters for Mobile Healthcare Applications," International Journal of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 75-79, March 2014. doi: 10.12720/ijeee.2.1.75-79