A Novel Method for ECG Signal Compression and Reconstruction: Down-Sampling Operation and Signal-Referenced Network

Objective. The wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring device is an effective tool for diagnosing intermittent heart diseases. However, the massive amount of ECG data increases power consumption during wireless transmission, thereby reducing the monitoring duration of the wearable device. Here, we presented a novel method to solve this problem. Method. To reduce the data size, we used a down-sampling operation to compress signals. Then, we designed a signal-referenced network to reconstruct the original signals from the compressed ones. We validated the proposed method on the China Physiological Signal Challenge 2018 database, used the root mean square error (RMSE) to evaluate the performance of the proposed network, and evaluated the effectiveness of the reconstructed signals via the F1-score of an ECG signal classifier. Main Result. The classifier used in this paper achieved an F1-score of 84% on 500 Hz signals reconstructed from 25 Hz, 89% from 50 Hz, 90% from 125 Hz, and 95% from 250 Hz. The RMSE of these four sampling rates was 0.10 mV, 0.08 mV, 0.05 mV, and 0.04 mV, respectively. Significance. The experimental result shows that the proposed network has a good performance when reconstructing signals. Furthermore, our method can remove the computational load of compressing signals from wearable devices.