Peak detection of PPG signals using fixed-point digital filters implemented in VHDL

Abstract

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a non-invasive optical method widely employed in biomedical signal processing to estimate vital parameters such as heart rate and blood oxygen saturation. Accurate and real-time peak detection is essential for reliable feature extraction in PPG analysis. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), with their inherent parallelism, low latency, and energy efficiency, provide an effective hardware platform for implementing such algorithms in embedded healthcare systems. Integrating PPG signal processing with FPGA-based architectures thus enables highperformance, real-time physiological monitoring for nextgeneration wearable and portable medical devices.The VHDL implementation and simulation scripts are available at GitHub repository.