Telemedicine using ECG data compression

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a useful tool for monitoring the health conditions of the subjects. ECG record contains a very important information about proper functioning of the heart and cardiovascular system as well. The ECG record is representation of deflections of physiological activities of the human heart during pumping of blood. This vital information is of absolutely useful to cardiologist for disease diagnosis. In case of ambulatory monitoring or critically cardiac disease it is required to store data for off-line analysis or transmission over public telephone lines. Such data generated is huge and needs to be stored by making optimum use of storage capabilities. For this reason we need effective data compression techniques. In the last four decades many ECG compression algorithm have been proposed by using different ECG compression techniques. One of the applications is to make use of these efficient compression schemes to provide low-cost and efficient medical healthcare. In the present paper, ECG data compression for long distance telemedicine is presented which promotes the utility of ECG data compression in the field of telemedicine i.e., tele-cardiology. The proposed telemedicine scheme is tested using ECG database with analysis and results.