An enhanced method of lossless ECG data compression using ASCII character encoding

Cardiac arrest is quoted as the major contributor to sudden and unexpected death around the globe. For detection and identification of cardiac problems, the electrocardiogram (ECG), which represents electrical activity of the heart, has to be continuously monitored typically over 24-h period. As a result, the produced ECG recording amounts to huge data sizes. In this paper, a new ECG data compression algorithm for real-time applications is proposed. The whole algorithm is written in C-platform. The algorithm is tested on various ECG data taken from PTB Diagnostic ECG Database. The compression scheme is such that the compressed file contains only ASCII characters. It is observed that the compression module gives a high compression ratio (CR = 18.48). The data reconstruction algorithm has also been developed using the reversed logic and it is seen that the difference between original and reconstructed ECG signal is almost negligible which leads to an excellent Quality Score.