A Preprocessor for On-Line Data Reduction in Accelerated Playback of ECG's

A preprocessor has been designed for signal acquisition and compression and applied in the context of ambulatory ECG processing. The interface uses four microprocessors to perform accelerated data acquisition and encoding of two simultaneous ECG signals at up to 60 times real time. The encoding is made along the well-known AZTEC algorithm. Although designed specifically to interface to the UNIBUS of a PDP-l1 minicomputer, generality of the approach ensures easy implementation of the board on other popular minicomputers.