Exploiting Prior Knowledge in Compressed Sensing Wireless ECG Systems

• Published in: IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics Vol. 19; no. 2; pp. 508 - 519
• Main Authors: Polania, Luisa F., Carrillo, Rafael E., Blanco-Velasco, Manuel, Barner, Kenneth E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.03.2015
• Subjects: Algorithms; Approximation algorithms; Approximation methods; Compressed sensing; Data Compression - methods; Databases, Factual; Electrocardiography; Electrocardiography - methods; Humans; Remote Sensing Technology; Vectors; Wavelet Analysis; Wavelet transforms; Wireless communication; Wireless Technology; electrocardiogram (ECG); compressed sensing (CS); wireless body area networks (WBAN); wavelet transform
• DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2014.2325017
• ISSN: 2168-2194

Recent results in telecardiology show that compressed sensing (CS) is a promising tool to lower energy consumption in wireless body area networks for electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring. However, the performance of current CS-based algorithms, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction quality of the ECG, still falls short of the performance attained by state-of-the-art wavelet-based algorithms. In this paper, we propose to exploit the structure of the wavelet representation of the ECG signal to boost the performance of CS-based methods for compression and reconstruction of ECG signals. More precisely, we incorporate prior information about the wavelet dependencies across scales into the reconstruction algorithms and exploit the high fraction of common support of the wavelet coefficients of consecutive ECG segments. Experimental results utilizing the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database show that significant performance gains, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction quality, can be obtained by the proposed algorithms compared to current CS-based methods.