A New Technique of Simultaneous Measurement of ECG and PCG Signals

Abstract

In this work, we measure the bioelectrical signals ECG (electrocardiogram) and PCG (phonocardiogram) simultaneously. At present individual signal measuring equipment are available such as ECG machine and stethoscope (digital) etc.

The diagnosis purpose both the signal have significant meaning individually, the PCG signal measured through stethoscope by an expert medical person. But the technique for simultaneous display and measurement of ECG and PCG signal may sort out some harmful condition and can give significant meaning before its occurrence such as heart attack and other heart problem.

The ECG and PCG signal are measured simultaneously amplified, filtered, digitized and then displayed on screen of computer or using display unit in time/frequency frame.

To carry out the study of correlation between phonocardiogram and electrocardiogram signals simultaneous acquisition and recording is the first and foremost requirement. For this purpose a hardware setup had been developed which consists of phonocardiogram and electrocardiogram. Both of this setup has been found working satisfactory and their performance has been expected throughout the work. For signal analysis and feature extraction it is essential that the electrocardiogram and phonocardiogram signals should be recorded and stored in the computer, so that analysis can be carried out using software, therefore hardware has been interfaced with the PC using PCL-207 add-on card.

For acquisition and storing both the signals, software have been developed stores these signals in amplitude verses tome format. Software has also been developed for extracting features like R peaks, heart sounds, cardiac interval, heart rate, duration between two consecutive first heart sounds and 1^st & 2^nd heart sound duration.

Keywords: Electrocardiogram, Phonocardiogram Correlation between ECG & PCG