Electronic – Notch filter ECG

active-filterbiopotentialfilter

I am using the Sparkfun Development kit based on AD8232 for acquiring the ECG signal from the body. Sparkfun Kit. Now I am getting a perfect ECG signal when I turn off all the power in the house and then view the signal; however this is far from my practical scenario. So I have been looking into designing a Notch filter to remove the PL frequency (50-60Hz). I have tried the following, without success:

  • Notch filter
    I have tried more but I am unable to post links; apparently I don't have enough repo. Anyway, I would appreciate it if someone can shed some light in this regard. I have tried Twin T notch with 2 opamps as well. Nothing seems to help.

Best Answer

In the past I have built power line frequency rejection filters using switched capacitor notch filters. A chip like the Maxim MAX7490 may work for your application where you can apply an external clock signal to set the notch rejection frequency. There are a few other similar parts from other vendors as well.

Keep in mind that as well as needing to filter 50/60 Hz from your signal it will highly likely be that you will also have to filter out 100/120 Hz as well.

These days with the availability of high performance low cost DSP devices such filtering is often done using software filtering techniques.