Scalable Coding and Prioritized Transmission of ECG for Low-Latency Cardiac Monitoring over Cellular M2M Networks

Abstract

This study reduces the delay in wireless transmission of electrocardiogram (ECG) data while protecting their essential elements to produce a clinically usable trace. The ECG data are divided into nine layers according to the signal amplitude resolution (6, 8, and 11 bits per sample) and sampling frequency (75, 300, and 2400 Hz). To avoid retransmission, each layer is delivered with a dynamic link adaptation scheme that provides different levels of error protection in a forward error correction process according to layer importance. This scheme is built on the conservative modulation and coding, as well as on the machinetype communication (MTC) protocol, from LTE-Advanced. Simulations show that our proposed system delivers ECG data that sufficiently support a clinical diagnosis with significantly low latencies (less than 10 ms) under severely erroneous channel conditions.