Adaptive Tunable Notch Filter for ECG Signal Enhancement

In this paper, a high performance adaptive tunable notch filter algorithm for accurate estimation of ECG signal is proposed. The power line interference and muscle contraction noise is significantly suppressed using the proposed adaptive notch FIR filter with tunable notch frequency. An important aspect of the proposed filter scheme is that it preserves the selectivity and attenuation at the notch frequency. The filter is optimized and its coefficients are computed such that the noise in ECG signal is minimised in a specified frequency range. The proposed algorithm estimates the frequency of unwanted signal and updates accordingly the filter coefficients for optimum performance. Based on simulation results, it is demonstrated that the proposed technique can be used to accurately extract the ECG information such as heart beat rate from noisy ECG signal and significant improvement in output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be achieved as compared to the normal adaptive notch filter technique.