Hardware/software implementation of the EEG signal compression module for an ambulatory monitoring subsystem

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a signal compression subsystem for an ambulatory EEG system. Ambulatory systems require low power consumption and offer a significant reduction of the patient´s incommodity during the EEG signal monitoring process. Hardware/Software co-design techniques were applied during the design of the EEG signal compression subsystem. A methodology for evaluating the efficiency of the hardware/software partitioning was applied to optimize the power consumption and to minimize the complexity of the hardware portion of the algorithm. The results show a significant reduction in the total execution time of the compression algorithm and a moderate reduction on the power consumption of the subsystem