  Energy consumption is an important issue in continuous wireless
telemonitoring of physiological signals. Compressed sensing (CS) is a promising
framework to address it, due to its energy-efficient data compression
procedure. However, most CS algorithms have difficulty in data recovery due to
non-sparsity characteristic of many physiological signals. Block sparse
Bayesian learning (BSBL) is an effective approach to recover such signals with
satisfactory recovery quality. However, it is time-consuming in recovering
multichannel signals, since its computational load almost linearly increases
with the number of channels.
  This work proposes a spatiotemporal sparse Bayesian learning algorithm to
recover multichannel signals simultaneously. It not only exploits temporal
correlation within each channel signal, but also exploits inter-channel
correlation among different channel signals. Furthermore, its computational
load is not significantly affected by the number of channels. The proposed
algorithm was applied to brain computer interface (BCI) and EEG-based driver's
drowsiness estimation. Results showed that the algorithm had both better
recovery performance and much higher speed than BSBL. Particularly, the
proposed algorithm ensured that the BCI classification and the drowsiness
estimation had little degradation even when data were compressed by 80%, making
it very suitable for continuous wireless telemonitoring of multichannel
signals.
