A Real Time and Lossless Encoding Scheme for Patch Electrocardiogram Monitors

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide. Due to advancements facilitating the integration of electric and adhesive technologies, long-term patch electrocardiogram (ECG) monitors (PEMs) are currently used to conduct daily continuous cardiac function assessments. This paper presents an ECG encoding scheme for joint lossless data compression and heartbeat detection to minimize the circuit footprint size and power consumption of a PEM. The proposed encoding scheme supports two operation modes: fixed-block mode and dynamic-block mode. Both modes compress ECG data losslessly, but only dynamic-block mode supports the heartbeat detection feature. The whole encoding scheme was implemented on a C-platform and tested with ECG data from MIT/BIH arrhythmia databases. A compression ratio of 2.1 could be achieved with a normal heartbeat. Dynamic-block mode provides heartbeat detection accuracy at a rate higher than 98%. Fixed-block mode was also implemented on the field-programmable gate array, and could be used as a chip for using analog-to-digital convertor-ready signals as an operation clock.