An energy efficient compressed sensing framework for the compression of electroencephalogram signals

Abstract

The use of wireless body sensor networks is gaining popularity in monitoring and communicating information about a person's health. In such applications, the amount of data transmitted by the sensor node should be minimized. This is because the energy available in these battery powered sensors is limited. In this paper, we study the wireless transmission of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. We propose the use of a compressed sensing (CS) framework to efficiently compress these signals at the sensor node. Our framework exploits both the temporal correlation within EEG signals and the spatial correlations amongst the EEG channels. We show that our framework is up to eight times more energy efficient than the typical wavelet compression method in terms of compression and encoding computations and wireless transmission. We also show that for a fixed compression ratio, our method achieves a better reconstruction quality than the CS-based state-of-the art method. We finally demonstrate that our method is robust to measurement noise and to packet loss and that it is applicable to a wide range of EEG signal types. © 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.