An Analysis of the Effects of Noisy Electrocardiogram Signal on Heartbeat Detection Performance

Heartbeat detection for ambulatory cardiac monitoring is more challenging as the level of noise and artefacts induced by daily-life activities are considerably higher than monitoring in a hospital setting. It is valuable to understand the relationship between the characteristics of electrocardiogram (ECG) noises and the beat detection performance in the cardiac monitoring system. For this purpose, three well-known algorithms for the beat detection process were re-implemented. The beat detection algorithms were validated using two types of ambulatory datasets, which were the ECG signal from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database and the simulated noise-contaminated ECG signal with different intensities of baseline wander (BW), muscle artefact (MA) and electrode motion (EM) artefact from the MIT-BIH Noise Stress Test Database. The findings showed that signals contaminated with noise and artefacts decreased the potential of beat detection in ambulatory signal with the poorest performance noted for ECG signal affected by the EM artefacts. In conclusion, none of the algorithms was able to detect all QRS complexes without any false detection at the highest level of noise. The EM noise influenced the beat detection performance the most in comparison to the MA and BW noises that resulted in the highest number of misdetections and false detections.