Embedded system-on-chip design of atrial fibrillation classifier

Atrial Fibrillation (AFIB) is one of the major risk factors of stroke and heart failure which can be observed from the electrocardiogram (ECG). This paper presents an embedded system-on-chip (SoC) architecture design of AFIB detection based on stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm for heart screening propose. The architecture is designed using the hardware/software co-design technique and prototyped on Altera DE2-115 FPGA platform. Hardware acceleration of compute intensive FFT operation is also carried out to enhance computation timing performance. The whole system consumes 40,830 LEs of Altera Cyclone-IV FPGA device. The total computation time of AFIB classifier is 22 seconds for 10 seconds ECG input data with the accuracy of 95.3% which able to detect AFIB rhythm, normal sinus rhythm, and non-AFIB rhythm.