Implementation of Compressed Sensing in Telecardiology Sensor Networks

Mobile solutions for patient cardiac monitoring are viewed with growing interest, and improvements on current implementations are frequently reported, with wireless, and in particular, wearable devices promising to achieve ubiquity. However, due to unavoidable power consumption limitations, the amount of data acquired, processed, and transmitted needs to be diminished, which is counterproductive, regarding the quality of the information produced. Compressed sensing implementation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) promises to bring gains not only in power savings to the devices, but also with minor impact in signal quality. Several cardiac signals have a sparse representation in some wavelet transformations. The compressed sensing paradigm states that signals can be recovered from a few projections into another basis, incoherent with the first. This paper evaluates the compressed sensing paradigm impact in a cardiac monitoring WSN, discussing the implications in data reliability, energy management, and the improvements accomplished by in-network processing.