Heart rate of a normal adult patient at rest is between 60 and 100 beats/min. A heart rate slower than 60 beats/min is called bradycardia; a heart rate faster than 100 beats/min is called tachycardia. To determine the heart rate from a recording made by modern ECG machines is relatively simple.

The standard 12-lead electrocardiogram is a representation of the heart's electrical activity recorded from electrodes on the body surface. This section describes the basic components of the ECG and the lead system used to record the ECG tracings. Topics for study: ECG Waves and Intervals.

An electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG) is a test that checks for problems with the electrical activity of your heart. An EKG shows the heart's electrical activity as line tracings on paper. The spikes and dips in the tracings are called waves. The heart is a muscular pump made up of four chambers .

The overall goal of performing electrocardiography is to obtain information about the structure and function of the heart. Medical uses for this information are varied and generally relate to having a need for knowledge of the structure and/or function. One additional form of electrocardiography is used in clinical cardiac electrophysiology in which a catheter is used to measure the electrical activity. The catheter is inserted through the femoral vein and can have several electrodes along its length to record the direction of electrical activity from within the heart.

An electrocardiograph is a machine that is used to perform electrocardiography, and produces the electrocardiogram. The first electrocardiographs are discussed above and are electrically primitive compared to today's machines. The fundamental component to electrocardiograph is the Instrumentation amplifier, which is responsible for taking the voltage difference between leads (see below) and amplifying the signal. ECG voltages measured across the body are on the order of hundreds of microvolts up to 1 millivolt (the small square on a standard ECG is 100 microvolts). This low voltage necessitates a low noise circuit and instrumentation amplifiers are key.