  Recent results in telecardiology show that compressed sensing (CS) is a
promising tool to lower energy consumption in wireless body area networks for
electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring. However, the performance of current
CS-based algorithms, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction quality of
the ECG, still falls short of the performance attained by state-of-the-art
wavelet based algorithms. In this paper, we propose to exploit the structure of
the wavelet representation of the ECG signal to boost the performance of
CS-based methods for compression and reconstruction of ECG signals. More
precisely, we incorporate prior information about the wavelet dependencies
across scales into the reconstruction algorithms and exploit the high fraction
of common support of the wavelet coefficients of consecutive ECG segments.
Experimental results utilizing the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database show that
significant performance gains, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction
quality, can be obtained by the proposed algorithms compared to current
CS-based methods.

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science