FPGA Implementation of Hybrid ECG Compression and Decompression Method to Improve the Compression Ratio

This paper presents a technique to compress data without loss for an electrocardiography (ECG) signal surveillance system in portable body area networks. The goal is to reduce storage space and power consumption, ensuring longer battery life. The proposed method includes lossless compression, run-length coding and Golomb–Rice encoding, along with prediction strategies. An adaptive linear predictor is constructed to minimize latency and storage space requirements. A customized hybrid system based on VLSI encoding and Golomb–Rice is designed to reduce the data burden associated with transmitted ECG samples. The output of the four-bit compression bit stream is used for ECG decompression using a digital filter with eight taps, eight multiplication and eight adders. The ECG compression ratio and decompression ratio are designed using microarchitecture and a targeted device vertex-5 FPGA. The lossless ECG compression ratio and decompression ratio produce the same input data sets, reducing LUT and slice registers and decreasing delayed power consumption.