Development of Breakout Boards for Wearable ECG Applications Based on the AD823X Microchip and the Arduino Platform

The development of wearable devices continues to be a growing trend. The mobile health wearables market is extremely fast-moving, with wearable ECG designs demanding increasingly complex features from manufacturers, such as size reduction, high accuracy, low weight, power efficiency, and good signal quality. The AD823X integrated circuits for ECG miniaturization, as an analog front-end (AFE), provide an amplified and filtered analog signal for subsequent digitization. The aim of this work is the development of expansion boards for portable ECG applications based on the AD823X microchip and the Arduino platform. This study includes three different circuit designs for specific ECG applications: cardiac monitor, ECG fitness, and Holter monitor. It also presents designs using both AD823X integrated circuits. After performing tests with analog stage, the Atmega328 microcontroller was used for the analog-to-digital conversion of the ECG signals, and a miniaturized custom breakout board was developed for each ECG application, incorporating a CSR BC417143 chip for Bluetooth connectivity. The digitized signals can be transmitted by serial cable, via Bluetooth to a PC, or to an Android smartphone system for visualization. Other performed tests included measuring the noise induced during the analog-to-digital conversion stage of the Atmega328 microcontroller. This work evaluated, compared, and determined the best of the applications proposed by the manufacturer of the AD8232X for a wearable ECG monitor, addressing the current needs of the devices and emerging trends in mobile health.