A Real-Time ECG Data Compression and Transmission Algorithm for an e-Health Device

This paper introduces a real-time data compression and transmission algorithm between e-health terminals for a periodic ECGsignal. The proposed algorithm consists of five compression procedures and four reconstruction procedures. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the algorithm was applied to all 48 recordings of MIT-BIH arrhythmia database, and the compress ratio (CR), percent root mean square difference (PRD), percent root mean square difference normalized (PRDN), rms, SNR, and quality score (QS) values were obtained. The result showed that the CR was 27.9:1 and the PRD was 2.93 on average for all 48 data instances with a 15% window size. In addition, the performance of the algorithm was compared to those of similar algorithms introduced recently by others. It was found that the proposed algorithm showed clearly superior performance in all 48 data instances at a compression ratio lower than 15:1, whereas it showed similar or slightly inferior PRD performance for a data compression ratio higher than 20:1. In light of the fact that the similarity with the original data becomes meaningless when the PRD is higher than 2, the proposed algorithm shows significantly better performance compared to the performance levels of other algorithms. Moreover, because the algorithm can compress and transmit data in real time, it can be served as an optimal biosignal data transmission method for limited bandwidth communication between e-health devices.