Real Time Data Acquisition Of Physiological Signals For An Instrumentation Course

The United States Naval Academy offers an instrumentation course for non-electrical engineering majors, which takes advantage of the PC plug-in data acquisition (DAQ) boards and PC software (MATLAB). In this course, several lab exercises were developed for the undergraduate study of physiological signals. This includes electrocardiography (ECG) and electromyography (EMG) signals. With the advent of real-time data acquisition and signal processing technology, it is now much easier to develop instrumentation lab experiments for student use. The current hardware and software enables our students to achieve highly accurate measurements, perform time domain and frequency domain analysis, and store the data for subsequent use, analysis, and design. This paper discusses some of the methods developed for implementing these labs. We believe our techniques have greatly enhanced the ease of teaching and learning these important topics in instrumentation.