Cloud enabled fractal based ECG compression in wireless body sensor networks

E-health applications deal with a huge amount of biological signals such as ECG generated by body sensor networks (BSN). Moreover, many healthcare organizations require access to these records. Therefore, cloud is widely used in healthcare systems to serve as a central service repository. To minimize the traffic going to and coming from cloud ECG compression is one of the proposed solutions to overcome this problem. In this paper, a new fractal based ECG lossy compression technique is proposed. It is found that the ECG signal self-similarity characteristic can be used efficiently to achieve high compression ratios. The proposed technique is based on modifying the popular fractal model to be used in compression in conjunction with the iterated function system. The ECG signal is divided into equal blocks called range blocks. Subsequently, another down-sampled copy of the ECG signal is created which is called domain. For each range block the most similar block in the domain is found. As a result, fractal coefficients (i.e. parameters defining fractal compression model) are calculated and stored inside the compressed file for each ECG signal range block. In order to make our technique cloud friendly, the decompression operation is designed in such a way that allows the user to retrieve part of the file (i.e. ECG segment) without decompressing the whole file. Therefore, the clients do not need to download the full compressed file before they can view the result. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and compared with other existing lossy ECG compression techniques. It is found that the proposed technique can achieve a higher compression ratio of 40 with lower Percentage Residual Difference (PRD) Value less than 1%.