FYP logbook (Week 6 - Week 9)

• Accurate and Factual Information Supported by Evidence (Refereed journals or publications are the ones that contain information reviewed by several experts in the field).
  • Does the information you have located come from authoritative sources?
  • If you obtained the information from a website, how reliable is the information?

For the information obtained for the refereed journals and publications, the papers had some of the acknowledgments. For example, the paper with titled Designing & FPGA Implementation of IIR Filter Used for detecting clinical information from ECG was found by the International Journal of Engineering and Advanced Technology (IJEAT), which IJEAT is an online, open access, peer-reviewed, and periodical international journal. The board of new editors of IJEAT will review all the submitted articles. Most of the papers were obtained from authoritative websites so I think the information that I collected should be reliable, for example, IEEE Xplore website.

• The Timeliness of the Publication. (For very current info then timeliness is a must but for historical perspective then timeliness may not be crucial)
  • Is the information timely or out-of-date for your topic?

For the timeline of the publications that I referred, the time are from 2010 to 2020 so I think the information is still considered timely and relevant.

• Type of Publication (This indicates different levels of complexity in introducing ideas)
  • Is the source scholarly, popular, trade or government publication?

Most of the papers that I referred are scholarly because mostly are done by other universities’ undergraduates and lecturers who implemented the similar concept with my final year project.

For this week, I also reviewed for one more paper that related to my FYP title, which titled with Intelligent system for detecting cardiac arrhythmia on FPGA. The article illustrates the hardware implementation of the detection system of cardiac arrhythmias on FPGA. The algorithm is based around the FIR and IIR filter and the hardware implementation was done in HDL (hardware description language). The result of this paper shows the contribution of implementation for an embedded system to better track patient’s heartbeat by increasing the computational efficiency while reducing the execution time.

• List the relationship of proposed idea to the system/end user/stakeholder in terms of daily or routine use.
  • End user – Cardiologists and patients – The proposed idea of FPGA-based IIR Filter for Detecting QRS ECG Signal will be very useful for cardiologists as nowadays the market still continues to evolve with new ECG monitoring device for healthcare facilities or patients that need to monitor the heart rhythms every day.
• List the relationship of proposed idea to the system/end user/stakeholder in terms potentials.
  • It would have the potential to ensure the cardiologists and patients monitor heart rhythms with higher accuracy and faster computation in order to detect cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the early stage through the portable heart-monitoring device.
  • The fast speed performance and the accuracy of the device is important so that the user will be warned in the early stage and will not generate a false alarm to the user.
• List the relationship of proposed idea to the system/end-user/stakeholder in terms of frequency of use.
  • The frequency of use would vary depending on the state of the illness and also the ages of the patients. For example, for the elderly patients most properly they need to use for monitoring the heart rhythms every morning so that the device can detect and warn the user when it detect unusual heartbeat.

For this week, I only listed some of the relationship of the proposed idea in terms of daily or routine use, potentials and frequency of use as the week was packed with Test 1 from various subjects.

Creating a Theoretical Framework: A theoretical framework is a top-down diagram showing the relationships between concepts, including cross connections among concepts, and their examples.

1. Identify the general/ broad topic you are interested in.
2. Brainstorm and list all the concepts (why, how many, what, etc.).
3. Write the main theme in the center of the page.
4. Use other concepts identified in 2. And connect them to the center concept.
5. Observe at the theoretical map and fit together the pieces to relate to the problem at hand.

For this week, I have reviewed two different papers which related to my FYP topic.

The first article titled with FPGA Implementation of Heart Rate Monitoring System. This paper describes a field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of a system that calculates the heart rate from Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. After heart rate calculation, tachycardia, bradycardia or normal heart rate can easily be detected. ECG is a diagnosis tool routinely used to access the electrical activities and muscular function of the heart. Heart rate is calculated by detecting the R peaks from the ECG signal. To provide a portable and the continuous heart rate monitoring system for patients using ECG, needs a dedicated hardware. FPGA provides easy testability, allows faster implementation and verification option for implementing a new design.

In the second article titled Novel simple decision stage of Pan & Tompkins QRS detector and its FPGA-Based implementation. In this paper it indicate that presents a new simple and efficient FPGA-Based implementation of the well-known Pan and Tompkins QRS detection algorithm. The design is implemented using Xilinx design tool, System Generator for DSP. In the authors' view, the specific features, that is simplicity, efficiency and authenticity, of the proposed model lies in the fact that the threshold value is updated for the next peak detection, from the previous smallest peak; in addition, the model is entirely designed simply with MCode blocks.

Conceptual Diagram: A conceptual diagram is a systematic depiction of an abstract concept in pre-defined category boxes with specified relationships, typically based on a theory or model. 

1. Identify and graphically depict the key variables in the research questions.
2. Identify and graphically depict the key relationships between the variables.
3. Identify and graphically depict the key context factors.
4. Support your discussion with solid peer-reviewed references

For this week, I have reviewed one more different paper which related to my FYP topic with titled FPGA-based detection of QRS complexes in ECG signal. This paper presents an FPGA-based algorithm for automatic detection of QRS complexes in ECG signals. The proposed algorithm is divided into 3 blocks: Filtering, Contrast Enhancement, and finally a Detection block based on time and amplitude thresholding of the enhanced data. The entire detection scheme was developed in accordance with embedding constraints. For validation, the method was tested on the MIT/BIH arrhythmia database containing 48 records of 30-minutes ECG. The FPGA-based algorithm correctly detects 95,35 percent of the QRS complexes, with a very limited ratio of false detection (only 8%). These results are in accordance with the most recent state-of-the-art off-line algorithms on the same database, and improves significantly FPGA-based ones that were tested on a limited number of ECG extracted from the MIT/BIH set of data.