An Optimized Low-Power VLSI Architecture for ECG/VCG Data Compression for IoHT Wearable Device Application

Abstract

Continuous monitoring of the electrical activity of heart signals using wearable Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHTs) devices plays a crucial role in decreasing mortality rates. However, this continuous monitoring using an electrocardiogram (ECG) or vectorcardiogram (VCG) generates huge clinical data. Moreover, these devices are constrained in terms of on-chip storage, data transmission capacity, and power. Thus, handling a large amount of data is difficult with these devices, making it necessary to compress these data for storage and transmission. Lossless or near-lossless data compression solves this problem, ensuring that no relevant physiological/clinical information is lost in the compression process. Therefore, low-power, resource-efficient, and lossless VLSI architectures are proposed in this article to compress multichannel ECG/VCG data. The designs are tested using the PTB database for both ECG and VCG data and can achieve compression ratios (CRs) of $3.857$ and $4.45$ with minimal power and area requirements making them suitable for low-power wearable healthcare devices.