The purpose of this project was to use our understanding of Instrumentation Amplifiers, electrical signals, Anti-Aliasing, Filters, Power along with other components and principles to create a PCB capable of capturing the heartbeat of a patient.

To create a functional EKG, my team and I started with Analytical computation of the component values for the four main parts of the design: Power Supplies, Instrumentation Amplifier, Isolator, Anti-Aliasing Filter and Finite Impulse Response Filter.

Power Supplies - Accurately determined the necessary voltages at each subsection of the circuit design

Instrumentation Amplifier - Since heartbeat signals produce a very low voltage, we used an Instrumentation Amplifier to boost the signal by a gain factor of 1000. This allowed is to accurately distinguish the important data from 60 Hz noise present.

Isolator - This allowed us to isolate the input and output signals from the power source.

Anti-Aliasing Filter - We designed our filter so that any high frequency signal gets attenuated when we reconstruct the signal. We aimed for a -64dB attenuation at 500Hz.

FIR Filter - After we ensured that our EKG was operating properly, we designed a filter to attenuate the 60Hz noise with our sampling rate being 1609Hz

We used Multisim to verify our analytical results numerically and used Ultiboard to create the PCB layout that we populated. The final project report and an image of the completed Ultiboard design can be seen to the right.

By the end of the project we were able to accurately record the heartbeats of all of our group members. We ran one of those signals through our FIR filter to show the heart's activity more clearly. A video of us recording heartbeat data and an image of the filtered signal can be seen to the right.