Recovering electrocardiogram missing samples in wireless transmission

Considering the emergence of telemedicine applications, different links such as fixed access network (PSTN), mobile access network (GSM/GPRS and future UMTS) or satellite interfacing (DVB-RCS technology) are involved in e-health applications. These are liable to induce errors and/or missing packets on the received data. Therefore the recovering of missing samples for biomedical signals is of great interest. This paper proposes a reconstruction method for ECG signals which is a combination of a left-sided and right-sided autoregressive (AR) model, and the well-known Gerchberg-Papoulis (GP) method. The proposed interpolation algorithm takes into account the samples before and after the missing ones to estimate a forward and a backward AR model. These estimates are used as an initialization of the original GP method. Results show that this interpolation method represents a really suitable technique to ECG reconstruction in a possible corrupted transmission.