SLOPE--a real-time ECG data compressor

An ECG sampled at a rate of 250 samples s-1 or more produces a large amount of redundant data that are difficult to store and transmit. In the paper, a real-time ECG data compressor, SLOPE, is presented. SLOPE considers some adjacent samples as a vector, and this vector is extended if the coming sample falls in a fan spanned by this vector and a threshold angle; otherwise, it is delimited as a linear segment. By this means SLOPE repeatedly delimits linear segments of different lengths and different slopes. The Huffman codes for the parameters to describe this linear segment are transmitted for that linear segment. SLOPEa, which is a slightly modified version of SLOPE, is used to compress ambulatory ECG data. All the operations used by SLOPE and SLOPEa are simple integer operations, both SLOPE and SLOPEa being real-time compressors. Experimental results show that an average of 192 bits per channel per second (bpcs) for each ECG signal is obtained by SLOPE and an average of 148 bpcs for each ECG signal is obtained by SLOPEa.