Removal of ECG baseline wander when recorded by a 24-bit ADC using a resting cycle template.

The development of electrocardiogram (ECG) wearable devices has increase due to its applications on ambulatory patients. ECG signals provide useful information about the heart's behavior, but when daily activities are monitored, motion artifacts are introduced producing saturation of the signal, thus losing the information. The typical resolution used to record ECG signals is of maximum 16-bit, which might not be enough to detect low-amplitude potentials and at the same time avoid saturation due to baseline wander, since this last issue demands a low-gain signal chain. A 24-bit resolution provides a more detailed ECG signal under a low gain input, and if the signal is corrupted by motion artifact noise but is not saturated, it can be filtered to recover the signal of interest. On this work, a 24-bit ADC is used to record the ECG, and a new method, the rest ECG cycle template, is proposed to remove the baseline wander. This new method is compared to high-pass filter and spline interpolation methods in their ability to remove baseline wander. This new method presumes that a user is able to stablish a rest ECG during his/her daily activities.