VLSI implementation of a lossless ECG encoder design with fuzzy decision and two-stage Huffman coding for wireless body sensor network

An efficient VLSI design of lossless electrocardiogram (ECG) encoder is proposed for wireless body sensor networks. To save wireless transmission power, a novel lossless encoding algorithm has been created for ECG signal compression. The proposed algorithm consists of an adaptive predictor based on the fuzzy decision control, and an entropy encoder including a two-stage Huffman coding. The VLSI architecture contains only 2.78 K gates and its core area is 34,411 μm² synthesized by a 0.18 μm CMOS process. Moreover, this design can be operated at 100 MHz processing rate by consuming only 28.3 μW. It achieves an average compression rate of 2.53 for the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. To compare with the previous low-complexity and high performance lossless ECG encoder studies, it is performed higher compression rate, lower power consumption and lower hardware cost than VLSI design.