On-board touch screen graphical interface design for SoC-based arrhythmia detector

Heart monitoring system is a device to carry out electrocardiogram (ECG) test. It can diagnose human's heart either in normal or abnormal condition based on ECG analysis. However, most of the current ECG device is bulky, expensive and lack of a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for user interaction. This paper describes an on-board GUI design based on capacitive touch-screen Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) display. It is integrated with the in-house design of ECG processing unit and arrhythmia classifier to form a complete System-on-Chip (SoC) based arrhythmia detector. The whole system is implemented on the Altera Video and Embedded Evaluation Kit with Multi-Touch (VEEK-MT) FPGA development board. The touch screen GUI acts as a front-end menu to capture user input and retrieve the offline ECG data stored in external SD card, as well as back-end result display in terms of arrhythmia classification result, ECG raw signal display, and R-R interval. Prototyping result shows that this system is light-weight, cost-effective and suitable to be user for different groups of user according to their knowledge background, including patient, nurse, physician and cardiologist.