Study on a Low-Complexity ECG Compression Scheme With Two-Tier Sensors

Toward reducing the bit overhead in telemonitoring systems, a novel ECG signal compression scheme at low complexity is proposed. The ECG signal compression for a single sensor or multiple single-tier sensors is most widely studied in the literature. Different from the existing work, a scheme based on two-tier sensors is considered where the lower tier sensors are designed to be at the lower complexity for reducing the cost. The compression for both the intersensor transmission and the outward transmission from the whole system is optimized in terms of quantization bits size. The stability of the proposed scheme is analyzed. Furthermore, the joint optimization of the transmission period and the quantization bits per transmission is investigated. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme method outperforms the conventional ones with respect to ECG reconstruction accuracy at a given bit-rate budget.