Sound Card with Matlab

[aredhel]

Hello there, I am trying to build a circuit that is able to count the human heart rate. I am done with the hardware, my only problem is the software part. After getting the ECG signal from the body I intend to interface my circuit with the computer through the microphone socket of the computer. The computer's sound card will act as an ADC and I will somehow figure out how to calculate the heart rate and display the result using GUI. Anyone knows how or could point me to the right tutorials on Matlab to:

1. Use the sound card as an ADC
2. Extract the digital ECG signal
3. Calculate the heart rate
4. Display the result (ECG signal and heart rate) using GUI
5. Maybe digital filtering as well

 

[Speakerguy]

You can read a sound file into matlab using the wavread() function.

The ECG is too low frequency to be read by a soundcard. You can use an AM modulator to get the ECG information into a bandwidth the soundcard can record (use 1kHz or so). Record it using some sound card utility as a wave file. Read it into Matlab, and demodulate it with Matlab's demodulation function. Do whatever you want to with it then.

The above might require the signal processing toolkit in addition to the basic matlab package.