Phonocardiography Data Compression Using Discrete Wavelet Transform

Telemedicine and other remote early intervention techniques play a vital role to improve the cardiac patient survival rate and decrease their hospitalized rate. Phonocardiography (PCG) is a widely used diagnostic tool to quickly identify the heart condition. It provides supplement diagnostic information to Electrocardiogram (ECG) as it can detect the structural defects of the heart that ECG cannot identify. Therefore, continuous PCG monitoring is of great interests for remote patient monitoring [1] [2]. However, 24 hours online monitoring generates a large amount of data to be transferred and stored at healthcare facilities. Moreover, end-to-end encryption is also required to share the data without compromising privacy or security. So, the data compression and encryption are necessary for the continuous monitoring of the PCG signal. But, very little research has been done on the compression of the PCG signal and the compression of the ECG signal is widely studied. This paper describes a PCG signal compression and encryption method which is suitable for the wireless cardiac patient monitoring applications.