A Fast Compressed Sensing Decoding Technique for Remote ECG Monitoring Systems

Compressed Sensing (CS) has been proposed as a low-complexity ECG data compression scheme for wearable wireless bio-sensor devices. However, CS decoding is characterized by high computational complexity. As a result, it represents a burden to the computational and energy resources of the network gateway node, where decoding is performed. In this article, we propose a Fast Compressive Electrocardiography (FCE) technique to address this problem. CS decoding in FCE is based on Weighted Regularized Least-Squares (WRLS), rather than the standard approach based on ℓ₁ norm minimization. The WRLS formulation takes into account prior knowledge of ECG signal properties to estimate an optimally compact and accurate representation of ECG signals. Numerical results show that decoding by FCE is on average 33 times faster than the fastest tested CS-based ECG decoding technique. In addition, high-quality ECG signal reconstruction by FCE is achieved at 32% higher compression ratio. Therefore, FCE can contribute to improving the overall energy and computational resource efficiency of CS-based remote ECG monitoring systems.