The effects of transmission errors in ECG real-timewavelet compression codecs

This paper discusses the error effects in wavelet compression codecs for real-time ECG monitoring in a wireless telecardiology application. Two different strategies for ECG coding are presented and the error effects in the received ECG signals are discussed. Both quantitative (RMS error index) and qualitative (cardiologist opinions) are presented in order to decide if it is useful to monitor retrieved information from ECG packets received with errors or erroneous packets should be discarded. Although RMS index suggests that it would be recommendable to show them, cardiologists conditioned their preference to the number of erroneous blocks in the monitoring process: few number of errors, monitoring no information; high number of errors, monitoring erroneous information