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Wireless Electrocardiogram Transmission in ISM Band: An Approach Towards Telecardiology

  • Systems-Level Quality Improvement
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Abstract

Remote monitoring of biomedical signals provides an opportunity to extend health care service to a distant patient. In this paper, a short range wireless telecardiology system is described with the objective to transmit electrocardiogram signal for remote end acquisition. The acquired signal was compressed using a combination of modified delta encoding and run length encoding technique and transmitted using a wireless transceiver operating in 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific and medical band to a distance of 400 ft. In the receiving end, error check principle was used to find any data loss before the data is reconstructed for feature extraction. With Physionet data using 8-bit quantization an average compression ratio (CR) of 12.23, percentage root mean squared difference (PRD) of 4.342 and PRD normalized (PRDN) of 9.271 were obtained. With ECG data collected from healthy volunteers, these figures came out to be 14.64, 12.92 and 13.46 respectively. An improvement of performance was observed with 10 bit quantization of ECG data. Computational simplicity of the proposed algorithm provides an opportunity to use a low end microcontroller to implement the compression in standalone hardware.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Jayanta Saha, MD (Med), DM(Card), Associate Professor in Department of Cardiology, Calcutta Medical College, Kolkata, India for clinical validation of the decompressed ECG signals. They also thank DST FIST Project 2009 from Govt. of India at Department of Applied Physics for the technical support. Mr. Dhiman Das and Mr. Soumya Roy, students of M.Tech in Instrumentation & Control Engineering helped in collecting the ECG data from the volunteers using the Biopac Systems and in the laboratory testing of the communication channel performance.

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  1. Department of Applied Physics, University of Calcutta, Calcutta, West Bengal, India

    R. Gupta & M. Mitra

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Correspondence to R. Gupta.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement

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Gupta, R., Mitra, M. Wireless Electrocardiogram Transmission in ISM Band: An Approach Towards Telecardiology. J Med Syst 38, 90 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-014-0090-5

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