This document is intended for faculty members who want to use and/or adapt the signal

processing project “Arrhythmia Detection Algorithms for Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators”

in their classrooms. This document explains all of the files and sub-folders in the Additional
Project Materials folder.

1. Student Preparation: This project is aimed at first year engineering students. Successful
completion of the project requires familiarity with differential calculus and basic programming
in Matlab. If students are new to Matlab, the following in-class and out-of-class activities will
provide students with enough background to successfully solve this signal processing
project. The total time for all of these Matlab preparation activities is 4-5 hours.

a. Matlab Tutorials (out-of-class): Go to the following URL:

http://www.mathworks.com/academia/student_center/tutorials/launchpad.html
Click on the Interactive Matlab Tutorial and complete the brief registration. Work
through the three groups of tutorials: Matlab On-Ramp (30 minutes); Matlab for
Problem Solving (60 minutes); and, Programming in Matlab (30 minutes).

b. Audio Clipping Mini-Project (out-of-class and in-class): First, outside of class,

review the Audio Clipping Mini-Project Background.ppt slides and attempt to
work through these guided instructions (60 minutes). Next, during class, work
through the Audio Clipping Mini-Project.doc assignment (60-90 minutes). All code,
data, and documents required to conduct this introductory Matlab project are in the
Mini-Project folder.

2. Teaming: These project documents make reference to students working in teams. Prior
experience indicates that students enjoy the work and learn more when working with others.
However, this project could also be performed by an individual. Also, the background lecture
employs an active learning technique called “think-pair-share” and the summary lecture
includes a “closure writing pair” technique. Educational research indicates that these types
of student engagement techniques improve student learning.

3. Exam Questions: The file titled Exam Questions.doc includes 16 short answer and two
design questions that could be used on a quiz or exam.

4. Ethics: The file titled IEEE Guidant ICD Recall Article.pdf is referred to in the Summary
Lecture slides. It provides a germane, recent, real example of ethics and how engineers’
work impacts people’s lives.

5. Project: This signal processing project allows students to explore how to develop an
algorithm in Matlab so that a patient’s ECG can be classified as either VT or SVT. The
project also provides students with a more sophisticated classification algorithm for
comparison with their simpler design. It is recommended that the project be conducted over
two weeks using a format that includes four in-class meetings: background lecture, first
hands-on lab, summary lecture, and follow-up hands-on lab. Each of these chronological
events is now described in more detail.

a. Background Lecture: The slides for this first meeting are in the file titled
Background Lecture.ppt. This project does not require that the faculty have
expertise in arrhythmias, cardiology, or ECG signal analysis. Instead, the necessary
technical information related to the heart and arrhythmias has been distilled and
included in this lecture. Slides 6 and 10 include an animation of electrical activity and
corresponding blood flow in the heart under various conditions. The animation has
been set up to play during the “slide show” mode; however, if this does not occur,
then the “notes” section of slides 6 and 10 give the URL for playing this online
animation. Slide 15 challenges students to develop and understanding for “how
much” of an electric shock the ICD therapy represents. Recalling that power is the
rate at which work is done, the question can simply be answered by:

Time = Work/Power = (300J) / (100W) = 3 sec.

But the curious student will realize that the more meaningful comparison is in terms
of power, not time. In other words, given that the therapy is 300J in about 10msec,
what light bulb could be powered?

Power = (300J) / (0.01sec) = 30kW.

That’s a bright bulb!

b. First Hands-on Lab: The project direction for students is in the file titled Student
Project Assignment.doc. This document steps the students through the
development of the Derivative Method (DM) algorithm. The specific guidance
includes hints and warnings with regard to important issues that have proven
challenging to students. It will behoove the faculty member who will guide the
students during their design and implementation to know that finding the three “R”
peaks in the ECG signals is the task that students find most difficult (this is done in
the code file titled r_peak.m). Happily, once the students successfully find the three
peaks, they tend to solve the remainder of the problem with little to no assistance.
The faculty member will see how the recommended Matlab code structure (as
described in the background lecture and in the student project assignment) reflects
the code given in the Derivative Algorithm sub-folder of the Code folder. All of the
code includes header comments as well as in-line comments. Note: it is worth
reminding students that they may observe the onset time visually—it is not required
that they write a function to detect the onset time automatically (however, some
 ambitious students will do this too). The project assignment refers to all of the signals
given in the Data folder: the normal ECG given by SR; the ten known ECG signals
(students know the first five are VT and the last five are SVT); and, the nine unknown
ECG signals (students do not know which are VT and which are SVT). Students find
it straightforward to use the EFF_calc.m file to find the EFF values for each ECG
signal. They also tend to independently determine how to compute and compare the
two methods in terms of speed. Finally, several students struggled with the concept
of thresholding (e.g., what is a threshold, how does one compute a threshold, and
how does one use a threshold), so emphasis on the relevant slides in the
background lecture can be helpful.

c. Summary Lecture: The slides for this third meeting are in the file titled Summary
Lecture.ppt. The primary goal of this third meeting is to recap the problem and
solution to date—this should be an interactive lecture with students sharing their
experiences, frustrations, and solutions. This meeting also provides: insight into the
expected results; guidance on how the students’ methods and results will be
assessed in the final meeting; and, an introduction to a recent, real-world ethical
issue regarding implantable cardioverter defibrillators (see item 4 above).

d. Follow-up Hands-on Lab: In this fourth and final meeting, the primary goal is to
assess the students’ designs and results. The file titled Project Scoring Table.doc
provides a rubric for this assessment; on average, a team can completely describe
and show their code and results in 10-15 minutes. The file titled Project Report
Solution.doc is an example of a final report that each team is expected to prepare. It
follows a typical technical report (or conference paper) format: problem definition,
methods, results and conclusions.