  We proposed a practical ECG compression system which is beneficial for
tele-monitoring cardiovascular diseases. There are two steps in the compression
framework. First, we partition ECG signal into segments according to R- to
R-wave periods. The partition aims at achieving more stable statistical
features between segments of ECG signal which is beneficial for saving bit
rates. After the partition, we optimize the bit rate in the sense of minimizing
ECG reconstruction error under a constraint of consumed bits. From the
experiment results, the proposed compression scheme is able to reduce the
computation for updating codebook, and save channel capacity resources for
transmitting ECG signals.
