Tools and methods which can handle with noisy ECG signals

Last Updated on July 23, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

The Schiller Medilog AR12 Plus Holter Recorder ECG device which was compared in a paper of the Swiss Federal Institute of Sports in Magglingen to compare it to the Polar H10 chest strap:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31004219/

offers no options to handle with noisy ECG signals:

90.02 Research & medical grade ECG devices which some of those were used to study the accuracy of consumer grade HRMs in different papers

and only a anolog to digital bit rate of 12 bits per second. Research grade devices offer at leat 16 bit A/D converters

But tools to remove ECG noise are available, for instance in HeartPy:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OOhuA6gAAAAJ&hl=en

and more methods are reviewed in a Sensors paper:

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/5/1468

HeartPy developer Paul van Gent from the Delft University of Technology decided during his PhD. thesis to make out of HeartPy an open source project. Paul studied for instance noisy ECG signals:

https://github.com/paulvangentcom/heartrate_analysis_python/blob/master/examples/5_noisy_ECG/Analysing_Noisy_ECG.ipynb

HeartPy, the Python Heart Rate Analysis Toolkit for noisy PPG signals which Paul developed:

https://python-heart-rate-analysis-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

can also be used for ECG data: tutorial notebooks are available in examples. These show how to handle various analysis tasks with HeartPy, from smartwatch data, smart ring data, regular PPG, and regular and very noisy ECG data.