FROG PACEMAKER
2021
In this project, my teammates and I developed a functional frog VVI pacemaker. This was designed to combat bradycardia.
We have developed a robust pacing algorithm that can sense a heart beat, calculate the associated heart rate and initiate stimulation when the heart rate falls below the desired rate indicated in the code. We developed an Arduino program that performs these tasks accurately on the frog’s cardiac electrogram acquired from our sensing circuit.
We first tested our pacemaker using a synthesized cardiac electrogram. Below is the plot of an electrogram recording in MATLAB.
Our benchtop pacemaker is capable of accurately measuring the electrogram, detecting the QRS complex in the cardiac cycle, digitizing the signal for analysis by the microprocessor, using this digitized signal for making a decision whether a stimulus should be fired or inhibited and generating a pulse of the required amplitude and duration.
Plot of a 1Hz, 4Vpp ECG signal sampled at fs = 150Hz over 5 seconds digitized in MATLAB using our custom RecordSignal and RecordAndPlot functions
Oscilloscope during sensing and stimulating the frog heartbeat. The amplified heartbeat is in blue and the stimulation circuit is in green
In collaboration with Vainavi Alva, Kelia Human, Mara Kaspers and David Ma