An Improved Lossless ECG Data Compression using ASCII Character Encoding

Telecardiology includes variety of applications and is one of the fastest-growing fields in telemedicine. In telecardiology the amount of recorded ECG data is very much high, hence the necessity of efficient data compression methods for biomedical signals is currently widely recognized. In this paper improved version of existing ASCII character encoding ECG data compression method is proposed. The existing method require minimum of 12 ASCII characters to store an array of 8 ECG voltage values but in proposed method it reduces to 8 ASCII characters. Hence by eliminating the necessity of some ASCII characters from existing method the compression ratio improved up to 65%, while the quality of the signal remain same. The proposed gives the compression ratio (CR) is 11.25 and the percent root mean squared difference (PRD) is 0.0206 on average for all 12 ECG signals. In addition, propose method is more efficient than existing ASCII character encoding as well as other ECG data compression methods.