Development of computational system for short-time biological signal acquisition

Abstract This paper presents the implementation of a computational system in which biological signals can be accessed in short-time intervals such as few seconds. The hardware used was a low-cost 12-lead module for ECG signal acquisition whose signal was accessed originally after a long recording time such as minutes or hours. The system was developed using the Python programming language and was split in two modules: (1) the Acquiring Module, responsible for the acquisition and processing of the raw bytes coming from the board and (2) the User Module, responsible for execute a User Application of interest. A multithreading approach was used to run both modules in parallel and to abstract the acquisition logic from the data processing logic. Thus, the development of complex applications can be organized in a simple manner. As a result, this paper shows two applications using this computational system, which are ECG signal plotting and computer game controlled by EMG signal. Both applications had a good performance and contribute for improvement of human-machine interaction.