Wavelet-Based ECG and PCG Signals Compression Technique for Mobile Telemedicine

One of the emerging issues in telehealth care system is how effectively the limited and well established mobile technologies that are now almost globally usable are exploited. The main challenge is to develop a mobile telemedicine system to transmit biosignals directly to a specialist in an emergency medical care unit for monitoring/diagnosis using an unmodified mobile telephone which provides the patient´s information on the spot without unnecessary delays in seeking care, access to health facility and provision of adequate care at the facility. To provide a practical mobile telemedicine in GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS limited capacity for transmitting the cardiac data for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) which are widespread health problems with unpredictable and life-threatening consequences in most regions throughout the world, the implementation of biosignals compression technique is focused in this paper. Therefore, a new and simple target data rate (TDK) driven Wavelet-threshold based cardiac signals compression algorithm is presented for mobile telemedicine applications. The performance of the compression system is assessed in terms of compression efficiency, reconstructed signal quality and coding delay. This algorithm is tested using MIT-BIH ECG databases and qdheart PCG database records and the experimental results are compared with other Wavelet based ECG coders. The presented algorithm is less complex because it does not require QRS detection, amplitude and period normalization and period sorting.