Compressive sampling of ECG bio-signals: Quantization noise and sparsity considerations

Compressed sensing (CS) is an emerging signal processing paradigm that enables the sub-Nyquist processing of sparse signals; i.e., signals with significant redundancy. Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals show significant time-domain sparsity that can be exploited using CS techniques to reduce energy consumption in an adaptive data acquisition scheme. A measurement matrix of random values is central to CS computation. Signal-to-quantization noise ratio (SQNR) results with ECG signals show that 5- and 6-bit Gaussian random coefficients are sufficient for compression factors up to 6X and from 8X-16X, respectively, whereas 6-bit uniform random coefficients are needed for 2X-16X compression ratios.