Arrhythmia Diagnosis by Using Level-Crossing ECG Sampling and Sub-Bands Features Extraction for Mobile Healthcare

Mobile healthcare is an emerging technique for clinical applications. It is usually based on cloud-connected biomedical implants. In this context, a novel solution is presented for the detection of arrhythmia by using electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The aim is to achieve an effective solution by using real-time compression, efficient signal processing, and data transmission. The system utilizes level-crossing-based ECG signal sampling, adaptive-rate denoising, and wavelet-based sub-band decomposition. Statistical features are extracted from the sub-bands and used for automated arrhythmia classification. The performance of the system was studied by using five classes of arrhythmia, obtained from the MIT-BIH dataset. Experimental results showed a three-fold decrease in the number of collected samples compared to conventional counterparts. This resulted in a significant reduction of the computational cost of the post denoising, features extraction, and classification. Moreover, a seven-fold reduction was achieved in the amount of data that needed to be transmitted to the cloud. This resulted in a notable reduction in the transmitter power consumption, bandwidth usage, and cloud application processing load. Finally, the performance of the system was also assessed in terms of the arrhythmia classification, achieving an accuracy of 97%.