Transmitting SPIHT compressed ECG data over a next-generation mobile telecardiology testbed

Recently, the set partitioning in hierarchical tree (SPIHT) was shown to be an excellent algorithm for ECG compression. However, how it performs in a cellular phone based wireless environment for telemedicine applications is not known. In this paper, a joint design for SPIHT-based ECG data compression method over a next-generation mobile telecardiology testbed based on the 3G cellular phone standard is proposed and the performance of the testbed for the compressed ECG data segments selected from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database is evaluated in terms of BER (bit error rate), PRD (percent of root-mean-square difference), compression ratio (CR), transmission time, and diagnostic quality. The simulation results show that during the successful transmission of compressed ECG (when BER is less than 10^-5), a CR of 8:1 provides a 87.5% reduction in total transmission time and a higher CR up to 20 can reduce up to 95% of the required time to transmit the ECG. Furthermore, most characteristics of the received ECG waveform, such as P wave, QRS complex, and T wave, can be reserved with clinically acceptable quality.