Compressed Sensing for Energy-Efficient Wireless Telemonitoring of Noninvasive Fetal ECG via Block Sparse Bayesian Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel block sparse Bayesian learning framework for energy-efficient wireless fetal ECG telemonitoring, effectively compressing and reconstructing non-sparse, noisy recordings while preserving inter-channel relations.

Contribution

It applies BSBL to fetal ECG data, enabling high-quality reconstruction with fewer nonzero sensing matrix entries, reducing computational load compared to existing methods.

Findings

High-quality reconstruction of raw FECG recordings.

Preserves interdependence among multichannel recordings.

Significantly reduces CPU load during compression.

Abstract

Fetal ECG (FECG) telemonitoring is an important branch in telemedicine. The design of a telemonitoring system via a wireless body-area network with low energy consumption for ambulatory use is highly desirable. As an emerging technique, compressed sensing (CS) shows great promise in compressing/reconstructing data with low energy consumption. However, due to some specific characteristics of raw FECG recordings such as non-sparsity and strong noise contamination, current CS algorithms generally fail in this application. This work proposes to use the block sparse Bayesian learning (BSBL) framework to compress/reconstruct non-sparse raw FECG recordings. Experimental results show that the framework can reconstruct the raw recordings with high quality. Especially, the reconstruction does not destroy the interdependence relation among the multichannel recordings. This ensures that the independent component analysis decomposition of the reconstructed recordings has high fidelity. Furthermore, the framework allows the use of a sparse binary sensing matrix with much fewer nonzero entries to compress recordings. Particularly, each column of the matrix can contain only two nonzero entries. This shows the framework, compared to other algorithms such as current CS algorithms and wavelet algorithms, can greatly reduce code execution in CPU in the data compression stage.