A novel lossless ECG compression technique for transmission in GSM networks

Abstract

This paper presents a novel Lossless ECG Compression using Symbol substitution (LECS) deployable on low computational devices (LCD) like mobile phones for effective use in telecardiology. Of the few LCD deployable compression algorithms, even losslessly compressed ECG suffers transmission loss in Global System for Mobile (GSM) networks due to the reduced character set supported by the SMS protocols. The LECS encodes using the Standard GSM Character ETSI GSM 03.38 set for un-trimmed ECG transmission. The evaluation using MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database showed an average compression-ratio (CR) of 7.03, Percentage-Root-mean-square-Distortion (PRD) as low as 0.0211 proving superior performance in both compression and quality for real-time mobile based telecardiology applications.