Vital Signs Acquisition and Communication System Board Implementation

II III Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Axel Jantsch for allowing me to work under his guidance and Mr. Said Zainali, CEO of Frame Access AB for his commitment to initiate the project and let me work under his supervision by providing the material resources for this project. This thesis project is one part of a team project which involved six students including me. Thus, the works done and reported in this document are the summary of team discussions and collaborative tasks. I would also like to thank my team collegues in alphabetical order, Chaluvadi Karthik, Garikipati Rajesh, Pendem Anand, Talasila Indira Priyadarshini and Vendra Naresh for their overall commitment to keep the team sprit up! IV V Abstract The evolution of analog and digital reconfigurable devices such as FPAAs and FPGAs are driving system designers to evaluate the traditional design techniques in order to exploit the programmability feature of the devices for better performance and higher quality. Moreover, with such reconfigurable devices the design complexity and design time of mixed signal circuits can be significantly reduced. The migration from the traditional design techniques to the reconfigurable one is affecting different sectors of the electronics design industry. Amongst them, the bio-medical equipments design industry is one the forefront targets of such migration. In this report, we propose a reconfigurable bio-medical platform. This platform, Vital Signs Acquisition and Communication System (VACS), is a bio-signal processing platform. It consists of vital signs inputs, signal conditioning circuit board with its combined hardware and software components and a display unit for data presentation. The platform is used to monitor at least five vital signs: heart performance (ECG), blood pressure, respiration, temperature, and blood oxygen levels. The target of the project is to design reconfigurable VACS on FPGA/FPAA and different hardware and software modules are implemented. In particular, in this report, the VACS platform board implementation is presented. The implementation requires thorough understanding and analysis of reconfigurable hardware and software co-design, proper component selection and interfacing based on specification set for the project. The board implementation work mainly focuses on ECG signal processing and makes some basic investigations on the remaining vital signs. Though specific to ECG, however, the overall platform is designed by considering the other different types of vital sign inputs.