Compressão de Sinais de Eletrocardiograma Utilizando Técnicas de Codificação Distribuída

Abstract

Electrocardiographic (ECG) signals can be used for both disease monitoring and diagnosis, which is also dependent on storage and transmission infrastructures. Nonetheless, as memory and transmission bandwidth are finite resources, it is necessary to compress ECG data. Additionally, with respect to remote monitoring, it is interesting that the target hardware be simple and affordable. The present work tackles the mentioned problems and proposes a ECG compression methodology, where experiments with a real implementation showed that such an approach is feasible and also effective, as long as aligned with an application’s specific conditions. This scheme is based on distributed source coding techniques, whose main feature is to perform most of the associated statistical exploration in decoders, while allowing a simple encoding process, which has the potential to favor its implementation in embedded systems, such as ECG holter devices.