Lost sample recovering of ECG signals in e-health applications

This paper shows the interest of an interpolation method based on parametric modeling to retrieve missing samples in ECG signals. This problem occurs more and more with the emergence of telemedicine applications. The different links (fixed access network (PSTN), mobile access network (GSM/GPRS and future UMTS) or satellite interfacing (DVB-RCS technology)) involved in e-health applications are liable to induce errors on the transmitted data. These errors/losses can occur anytime and anywhere (according to the channel availability, memory overflows, protocols, etc) during a transmission process. Therefore the recovering of missing samples for biomedical signals is of great interest. The method used in this paper is based on a left-sided and right-sided autoregressive model, i.e., the interpolation algorithm uses the samples before and after the sequence of missing samples. An objective measure is used to assess the method performance. Results show that this interpolation method represents a really suitable technique to ECG signal reconstruction in a possible corrupted transmission.