EGG Amir
EGG Amir
EGG Amir
2478/v10048-009-0022-6
Electrogastrography (EGG) is a non-invasive method for recording the electrical activity of the stomach. This paper presents a
system designed for monitoring the EGG physiological variables of a patient outside the hospital environment. The signal acquisition is
achieved by means of an ambulatory system carried by the patient and connected to him through skin electrodes. The acquired signal
is transmitted via the Bluetooth to a mobile phone where the data are stored into the memory and then transferred via the GSM
network to the processing and diagnostic unit in the hospital. EGG is usually contaminated by artefacts and other signals, which are
sometimes difficult to remove. We have used a neural network method for motion artefacts removal and biological signal separation.
Keywords: Electrogastrography, wireless, telemedicine
1. INTRODUCTION
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A. Conditioning circuits
A.1. EGG sensor
The electrogastrograph is constructed to measure the
electrical potential between various points of the body. We use Fig.3 Band pass filter circuit
the Ag-Agcl electrode in a standard EGG acquisition system7.
Depending on how the electrode pairs are connected to the B. Central Processing Unit (CPU)
EGG sensor, different waveforms and amplitudes can be
The Data Acquisition System is composed of two main
obtained. Each pair contains unique information of the
subsystems: the programmable digital data acquisition system
stomach activity.
and transducers with their associated circuits. The requirement
of data acquisition system dictated the use of the
microcontroller. We adopted the 16 f 876 microcontroller. It
is principally composed of 5 channels of 10 bit analog-to-
digital converter (ADC), 3 timers and 2 hardware pulse-width
modulation (PWM) generator modules, an universal
synchronous asynchronous receiver transmitter (USART), an
in circuit serial programming interface (ICSPI), 8K FLASH
memory, and a 20MHz clock. This clock generator is very
suitable for working together with the Bluetooth module to
Fig.2 The EGG amplifier circuit fulfil the wireless communication task.
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4. EXPERIMENTATION AND EGG ANALYSIS In the part of our signal (Fig.5-a) we observe two pulse
An acquisition has been carried out with the ambulatory peaks around 40 seconds and 180 seconds. The suppression of
system on a volunteer patient over a 4 hours time period. The the artefact peaks by filtering is to be avoided because of the
sampling period chosen was 1 second. Thus, the number of presence of a frequency band common to the useful EGG
samples acquired over 4 hours was 14.400. These data values signal and we have chosen to use neural nets to overcome this
were transmitted via the Bluetooth to the cell telephone where difficulty.
they were stored on a Secure Digital memory card using the
FAT 16 format. After 24 hours the stored data were sent to the A . Motion artefact in EGG measurement
PC in the hospital via the web service. Up to a recent past, the deletion of EGG data with motion
Fig.5-a represents a slice of 250 samples of the received artefacts was performed by visual inspection. Unlike other
signal stored in the PC memory. electrophysiological recordings, the EGG is very vulnerable to
This interval has been chosen with artefacts peaks resulting motion artefacts in the ambulatory carried system. The
from the volunteer’s movement during the acquisition. These artefacts are not only strong, but also have a broadband
pulses with very short durations are therefore present inside spectrum, and their frequencies overlap with that of the gastric
the signal received by the PC. The spectral representation of myoelectrical activity. This makes it difficult to separate them,
the signal is given in Fig.5-b. and quantitative analyses of the EGG data are jeopardized.
Therefore, an efficient solution for automated detection and
elimination of motion artefacts in the EGG is required.
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has three layers: one input layer, one hidden layer, and one
output layer. The output for the data with motion artefacts is
set to one, whereas the output for those without motion
artefacts is set to 0.
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