An Efficient Lossless Compression Algorithm for Electrocardiogram Signals

Abstract

This paper focuses on a novel lossless compression algorithm which can be efficiently used for compression of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The proposed algorithm has low memory requirements and relies on a simple and efficient encoding scheme which can be implemented with elementary counting operations. Thus it can be easily implemented even in resource constrained microcontrollers as those commonly used in several low-cost ECG monitoring systems. Despite its simplicity, simulation results carried out on real-world ECG signals show that the proposed algorithm achieves higher compression ratios as even compared to other more complex state-of-the-art solutions.