Feasibility study on ECG data transmission over voice for patient telemonitoring system

In this paper we present some schemes for transmitting electrocardiography (ECG) and voice signals simultaneously using a voice channel with some limitations of telephony system. A blind signal separation method and a beamforming algorithm concepts are reviewed first. However, they face some difficulties when implemented in the telephony system. Thus, we propose a separation system based on filtering concept with low computational complexity. Based on simulation result, the proposed system has successfully separated the voice and the ECG signals. The correlation indexes between the separation signals and the original ones are 0.99 and 0.87 for voice and ECG respectively. The simulation with additional noise shows that the noise has a bigger effect to the voice compared with the ECG signal. From the complexity point of view, the proposed separation system requires 5 adders and 82 registers.