Copyright © 2013 E. Castillo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper illustrates the application of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for wandering and noise suppression in electrocardiographic (ECG) signals. A novel one-step implementation is presented, which allows improving the overall denoising process. In addition an exhaustive study is carried out, defining threshold limits and thresholding rules for optimal wavelet denoising using this presented technique. The system has been tested using synthetic ECG signals, which allow accurately measuring the effect of the proposed processing. Moreover, results from real abdominal ECG signals acquired from pregnant women are presented in order to validate the presented approach.