Power Efficient Compressive Sensing for Continuous

Monitoring of ECG and PPG in a Wearable System

Venkat Natarajan and Apoorv Vyas
venkat.natarajan@intel.com, apoorv.vyas@intel.com
Signal and Systems Lab, Wireless Communications Research, Intel Labs
India Technology India Pvt. Ltd., Devarabisanahalli, 560103,
Bengaluru, India

Abstract— We demonstrate an end-to-end system prototype

using Compressive Sensing (CS) to power-efficiently compress
continuous bio-signals in a wearable body sensor network (BSN).
We use a variant of a Binary Permuted Block Diagonal (P-BPBD)
matrix encoder and pad the input signal symmetrically to achieve
high compression ratios for ECG and PPG signals. In our
approach, the gateway dynamically tunes compression parameters
to adapt to changing signal sparsity levels during continuous
monitoring and transmits them to the sensor node. We show that
the power consumed by our encoder on a 32MHz Intel® CurieTM
compute module is much lower than that consumed by a standard
Wavelet-based (DWT) encoder. We also show how CS can
simultaneously de-noise ECG signals during reconstruction. After
evaluating multiple reconstruction algorithms, we demonstrate
real-time signal recovery via an implementation of the Alternating
Direction algorithm on a 500MHz Intel® Edison board, used as a
gateway.
Index Terms—Compressed Sensing, Smart wearables, IOT, CS
De-noising, Body sensor networks, ECG PPG compression, DWT
compression, Continuous monitoring.
I. INTRODUCTION
Continuous ambulatory monitoring of bio-signals in
everyday life is a game-changer for a range of wearable
applications including healthcare sports and biometric
authentication. For example, continuous real-time ECG
monitoring enables tracking cardiac activity for extended
periods to identify and mitigate risks and enhances wellness of
the patient. Similarly sports monitoring systems rely on
continuous tracking of physiological signals to enhance
performance of athletes. Continuous monitoring of bio-electric
signals for long durations under free living conditions faces
stringent technical constraints: maximizing battery life,
efficiently using small memory space on the sensor node,
resilience to motion-artifacts, and flexible adaptation to the non-
stationary properties of the continuously sampled signal. In any
wearable system, continuous wireless transmission of high
throughput data (such as ECG) significantly reduces node
battery life. It requires a power efficient way to compress and
stream the data to a compute capable gateway. For example,
continuous sampling of ECG signals at a rate of 500 bytes/s
results in several megabytes of data within few hours. Fig. 1
depicts the signal processing pipeline and related mathematical
operations for two different compression algorithms:
Compressive Sensing and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT).
(a)
(b)
Fig 1. Signal Processing Pipeline for: (a) DWT Compression and
(b) Digital Compressive Sensing in a Body Sensor Network.
DWT, as shown in Fig. 1a, delivers high compression with
low signal loss; yet it is computationally demanding, memory
intensive, and consumes a significant amount of energy [8,9].
Furthermore, to embed DWT in a resource-constrained node
one must overcome other challenging constraints, e.g. fixed
point implementation for low power, embedded code in finite
SRAM memory, etc.
Compressive Sensing [3] (Fig. 1b) offers a low power alterative
to DWT for real-time streaming because the data encoding
operation on the battery powered node is computationally light
while the more computationally intensive reconstruction
algorithm is performed on the gateway, exploiting the
asymmetric architecture of a wireless wearable system.
Moreover, bio-signals are naturally sparse in basis such as
DCT/Fourier and meet sparsity requirements as per CS theory.
This makes compressive sensing an excellent choice for real-
time power efficient data compression of bio-signals in a body
sensor network (BSN) [2].
II. PRIOR ART AND THEIR LIMITATIONS
From a CS implementation perspective, it is critically
important to select the right encoding matrix and the
corresponding sparse basis [1]. The encoding matrix must meet
multiple stringent constraints simultaneously: it must be
embeddable deliver high compression performance with low
reconstruction error on important bio-signals such as ECG and

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PPG in bases in which they are known to be sparse, and be power
efficient for node battery life.
Traditionally, compressive sensing has used the random
Gaussian sensing matrix to encode an input bio-electric signal
[3]. Such a matrix, being dense, requires more onboard memory
with relatively high compute capability. That fact makes it more
difficult to embed in a resource-constrained wireless node.
Hence, alternate sensing matrix types with different distributions
and more compact structure have been proposed. Allstot, Chen
et al. [4-7] have investigated the efficiency and power savings of
toeplitz, circulant, and triangular sensing matrices for
compressed sensing of ECG signals. However, embedding these
matrices in a resource-constrained node remains challenging
because the random elements of the sub-matrix need to be
generated on-board the sensor node. Pre-calculating and storing
of these matrices are impractical and of limited use because the
encoding logic and matrix structure need to adapt to variations
in the sampled signal and scale to different types of bio-signals
(e.g. ECG, PPG, EEG).
The use of the Binary Permuted Block Diagonal (BPBD)
sensing matrix simplifies the implementation of the encoding
algorithm [1, 2] without compromising high sensing efficiency
with accurate reconstruction. Yet, a key shortcoming of using
BPBD encoder is that the compression curve is discontinuous
with only limited choices for the compression operating points.
For example, standard BPBD supports only a few compression
settings, e.g. Compression Ratio (CR) = 2, 4, 8, 16…etc. for
input signal of 512 samples. However, to design and operate the
compression algorithm at the best power efficiency for a given
signal sparsity, the designer needs to set CR as dictated by the
sparsity and CS theory and not be limited by encoder structure.
Furthermore, another challenge in continuous monitoring
applications is that the sparsity within the sensor streams varies
due to non-stationarity, resulting in large reconstruction errors
for a static compression parameters. In [13], Behravan et. al. use
a parameter called sparsity number to tune the compression
ratios. The sparsity number is a lower bound of the sparsity as
defined by CS [13]. The limitation of this method is that the true
sparsity of the signal can differ significantly from the sparsity
number as defined in their work, leading to poor reconstruction
performance. Moreover, since sparsity number is calculated
using the recovered signal, it is prone to reconstruction errors.
III. OUR APPROACH
We overcome the limitation of standard BPBD encoder [1]
by using a symmetric padding algorithm, which we call Padded-
BPBD (P-BPBD),that operates at the best CR and power
efficiency for a given sparsity in keeping with CS theory. Our
algorithm generates a wide continuous range of feasible
compression points that the system can operate in.
To minimize reconstruction errors arising from changing
sparsity of signal in the field, we propose a novel technique
where the gateway dynamically adapts and tunes compression
parameters based on current sparsity levels. The real-time tuning
of parameters is achieved by periodically transmitting raw
(uncompressed) measurements from the node to the gateway.
Using the raw measurements, the gateway algorithmically
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computes the best CR to meet the target reconstruction loss. The
revised parameters are then transmitted to the sensor node for
subsequent encoding operations. The overheads introduced by
this adaptive algorithm are relatively small and worth the trade-
off since it enables the system to operate optimal compression
and best power efficiency.
In contrast to sparsity number used in [13], the use of
reconstruction accuracy to determine the optimal CR is a more
direct measure to control reconstruction errors. The periodic use
of raw measurements directly by the gateway to compute the
optimal CR is advantageous as it avoids accumulated errors by
using reconstructed signal based sparsity number.
Insofar as determining optimal compression parameters for
the signal, we show that using alternate metrics such as accuracy
of certain features (e.g. heart rate) extracted from a reconstructed
signal can push compression performance and associated battery
life savings much higher than otherwise achievable with
reconstruction error constraints such as percentage root-mean-
square difference (PRD), alone. This optimization is particularly
valuable in scenarios where we are only interested in specific
features such as heart rate (as opposed to the entire signal) to
make inferences on the user context.
Because continuous monitoring systems are noise prone, we
demonstrate a method to simultaneously de-noise the signal
during the acquisition process without any additional post-
processing steps. In this context, we present CS based de-noising
for an ECG signal affected by a zero mean Gaussian noise.
Finally, to show a real time implementation, we evaluate
three reconstruction algorithms: Approximate Message Passing
[14], Orthogonal Matching Pursuit [11] and Alternating
Direction algorithm [12]. Based on reconstruction performance
(accuracy/execution time), we built an embeddable version of
the latter algorithm that is optimized for variable reuse, low
precision fixed floating point operations, and efficient memory
usage. We have demonstrated real time reconstruction on
500MHz Intel® Edison board, used as a gateway.
The specific contributions of the current work are as follows:
1. A novel P-BPBD CS encoder that supports fine grained
compression for ECG/PPG signals.
2. An adaptive algorithm that delivers optimal
compression setting for a signal with changing sparsity.
3. An end-to-end Proof of Concept comprising of 32MHz
Intel® CurieTM compute module (product code
JHCURIE) and Intel® Edison board (product code
EDI1BB.AL.K) to demonstrate power efficient
compressive sensing using P-BPBD with real time
reconstruction for ECG and PPG bio-signals.
A. Padded BPBD Encoder
A BPBD encoding matrix (Fig. 2) consists of a sub-matrix
of 1’s arranged as a block along the diagonal with the off-
diagonal elements set to zero. The number of elements or size
of the sub-matrix in a BPBD matrix is N/M where N is number
of columns and M is the number of rows. We construct the
BPBD matrix on the sensor node based upon the target
compression ratio control setting received from the gateway.
Ordinarily, in a traditional BPBD technique, the number of
samples in a window is exactly divisible by the sub-matrix size
or CR [1]. This implies that only a discontinuous set of
compression ratios are feasible for a fixed sampling window
size and is not practically useful as described earlier. Our
symmetric approach that matches the dimensions of the
specific BPBD matrix for each compression ratio enables
the user to obtain any desired integer compression ratio
(without discontinuities).
Fig.3. Dynamic calculation of compression parameters on gateway and
subsequent transmission to sensor node

IV. CS MODEL AND EMBEDDED POWER CHARACTERIZATION

We validated our compressive sensing algorithm on an
Intel® CurieTM compute module (32MHz). Our experimental
(a) (b)
apparatus consists of an Intel® CurieTM compute module,
Fig.2 (a) Example of a BPBD matrix. (b) Our Symmetric
Oscilloscope, Multi-meter, power and performance
padding logic
measurement software as shown in Fig. 4. To benchmark CS
Fig. 2a-b gives an example of BPBD matrix and performance (power consumption and embedded reconstruction
corresponding symmetric padding logic. If the length of accuracy), we also embed and performance characterize the
signal (N) is not divisible by Compression Ratio (CR) i.e. traditional DWT algorithm on the Intel® CurieTM compute
Remainder (N/CR) ≠ 0, then, module and compare our results.
We symmetrically pad the signal at the end to next nearest
length divisible by the CR i.e.
Padding size p = ((floor (N/CR) + 1)* CR) – N.
The values of the padded elements are given by
X[N+k] = X[N-k] i.e. mirror padding.
This means we can set any compression ratio and obtain the
appropriate BPBD matrix.

Table 1 shows that our P-BPBD matrix exhibits excellent

incoherency as required for CS with respect to the Fourier basis. Fig.4 Our algorithm power characterization system on Intel®
Incoherence is defined as the largest correlation between sensing CurieTM compute module
matrix Φ (P-BPBD) and basis Ψ (DFT) and is a requirement for We assess our techniques under two different constraints
Compressive Sensing. The size of the BPBD matrix Φ is MxN used in signal reconstruction: percentage root-mean-square
and the size of the sparse basis Ψ is NxN, where N is the window difference (PRD) and heart-rate accuracy (e.g.: differences in
size obtained after samples are artificially added to the original beat-rate calculated from the recovered signal compared to the
input window by symmetric padding. original uncompressed signal). The use of the PRD constraint
Number Theoretical helps recover the entire signal, albeit at the cost of a lower CR
Compression P-BPBD P-BPBD
of Coherency
Ratio Size
padded Lower
Coherence with the attendant higher transmission power. Alternatively, the
(N/M) (MxN) (1/√N, 1) use of feature accuracy constraints helps set high CR with low
element Limit (1/√N)
2 256x512 0 0.0442 0.0626 transmission power while recovering only select features.
10 52x520 8 0.0439 0.1399 ∑𝑁
𝑛=1(𝑥1[𝑛] − 𝑥2[𝑛])
2
𝑃𝑅𝐷 = √ 𝑁 2
× 100
25 21x525 13 0.0436 0.2228 ∑𝑛=1(𝑥1[𝑛])
Table 1. Excellent Incoherency of BPBD sensing matrix with Fourier Where x1 is the original signal and x2 is the reconstructed
(DFT) basis signal. N is the length (i.e. dimensionality) of both the signals.
B. Adaptive CS Algorithm
In continuous ambulatory monitoring, the sampled signal is V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
likely to show significant variability in morphology, noise, We first evaluate the compression efficiency via MATLAB
signal quality etc., so the compression ratio is periodically models on ECG and PPG signals separately and subsequently
updated by the gateway and transmitted to the sensor node to validate the simulation results on an Intel® CurieTM compute
reconfigure the BPBD encoder (Fig.3). This enables tuning the module and Intel® Edison board. Separately, we model and
compression logic in real time to meet application-dependent validate the multi-level dyadic DWT algorithm with
quality constraints even as the signal properties vary. Daubechies-6 wavelet (db6) [9] for comparison. The data sets

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 include both clean and noisy ECG/PPG signals from the MIT- Conventional BPBD-CS gives Our BPBD-CS algorithmn gives a
discontinuous compression curve continuous compression curve
BI repository [11]. We then show, by modelling, how setting CS

Reconstruction Loss %
Reconstruction Loss %
40 40

parameters adaptively improves reconstruction performance. 30 30

We next discuss CS based de-noising for ECG signals and 20 20

comparative assessment of different signal recovery algorithms. 10 10

0 0

A. Compression performance 0 5 10

Compression ratio
15 20 0 2 4 6 8 10

Compression ratio
12 14 16

We present an example of P-BPBD CS on a clean PPG that (a) (b)

gives excellent recovery (PRD = 4.38%) with high compression Fig. 7. Our padding logic generates fine grained compression curves
ratio (CR = 10). Fig. 5a is the raw PPG signal. Fig 5b gives the The extent of achievable compression depends on the
encoded PPG signal. The morphologies of original and encoded specific constraints set by the application. We evaluate the
signal are similar, as the P-BPBD CS-encoder performs a block- impact of two different constraints: PRD and beat-rate
averaging operation on the signal. Fig 5c shows the accuracy, on the maximum compression ratio achievable
reconstructed PPG signal. (Table. 2). For a PRD ~10%, we achieve a CR=14 for PPG.
Encoded clean PPG using BPBD However, if the application requires only heart rate and not
@CR= 10 the complete signal, we can achieve a CR=23 for the same
35
30 PPG signal cutting data transmission traffic by a factor of
Amplitude

23. As table 2 shows, with a CR=23, although reconstructed

25
20

signal quality is poor (PRD=~20%), we can still extract

15
10
5
0 accurate beat-rate.
0 10 20 30 40 50 60

Sample number Max CR Remarks

Signal Constraint
(a) Original PPG (512 samples) (b) P-BPBD encoded PPG (52 achievable
samples) ECG PRD= 14% 6
Reconstructed clean PPG @CR=10, Can extract accurate beatrate
accurate beat
PRD=4.38 ECG 11 even with poor recovered
rate
3
signal quality (PRD= 40.05%)
2.5 PPG PRD= 10% 14
2
Can extract accurate beatrate
mV

1.5
accurate beat
1 PPG 23 even with poor recovered
Reconstructed PPG
rate
0.5
0
Original PPG signal quality (PRD= 18.19%)
0 100 200 300 400 500 600
Sample number Table. 2. Max compression ratio (CR) achievable under
(c) Reconstructed PPG (512 samples) different constraints using P-BPBD CS
Fig. 5. Example of P-BPBD based Compressive Sensing using on PPG Finally, we show that P-BPBD-CS algorithm is superior in
Our P-BPBD CS encoder works well even for a noisy ECG both ease of implementation and compression performance
signal with baseline wander (Fig. 6a) and a noisy PPG signal compared to prior art techniques such as Random Gaussian
with motion artefacts (Fig. 6b). This means we can use this based CS and DWT. In Fig. 8, we show that our P-BPBD-
technique to power-efficiently transmit both clean and noisy CS algorithm outperforms random Gaussian algorithm
ECG or PPG signals encountered in free living unconstrained across a range of compression ratios for ECG and PPG.
conditions.
Noisy PPG reconstruction @CR=14,
Noisy
Noisy ECG ECG reconstruction
reconstruction @CR=6,
Noisy
NoisyPPG reconstruction
@CR=14, @CR=14,
Noisy ECG reconstruction @CR=6, @CR=6, PPG reconstruction
PRD=10.4297
PRD=13.71
PRD=13.71
PRD=13.71 PRD=10.4297
PRD=10.4297
400 400 5000
400
5000 5000 reconstructed PPG
4000 reconstructed
reconstructed PPG PPG
200
200 200 4000 4000
30003000 originaloriginal
PPG PPG
3000 original PPG
0 00
20002000
0 -200 00 100 100200200 300200 400 500
300 400 500
mV

2000
mV

100 300 400 500

mV
mV
mV

1000
-200 -200 1000
mV

1000 0
-400 0
-400 -400 0-1000 0 100 200 300 400 500
-600
Original ECG
OriginalOriginal
ECG ECG
-10000 0 100
100
200
200
300
300
400
400
500
500 (a)
Reconstructed ECG -1000-2000
-600 -600 Reconstructed ECG
-800 Reconstructed ECG -2000
-2000-3000
-800 -800 Sample number -3000 Sample number
-3000
Sample
(a)
Sample number
number (b) number
Sample
Sample number
Fig.6. P-BPBD CS works well even on noisy ECG/PPG.

The use of symmetric padding (P-BPBD) in the encoder results

in continuous compression characteristic curve as shown below
in contrast to standard BPBD [1]. (Fig 7)
(b)
Fig.8 Superior reconstruction of our padded P-BPBD CS
scheme over prior art ( Random Gaussian [3] )

339
Based on comparing only compression performance, we B. Power-efficiency
find that P-BPBD CS algorithm offers similar results to Our P-BPBD-CS technique is more power efficient for a
DWT approach (Fig. 9). given reconstruction quality (Table 4) than a state of the art
DWT compression algorithm. Based on power characterization
on Intel® CurieTM compute module (32MHz CPU, 80KB
SRAM), we found that the embedded BPBD algorithm is ~100X
faster than DWT with energy consumption less than ~3% of that
of DWT for the same reconstruction loss. This shows that P-
BPBD is the compression algorithm of choice for real time
continuous sampling and transmission of bio signals.
Compression Execution Energy
Algorithm
Ratio Time Overheads
(a) (b) CS-BPBD CR=4 to
0.32ms ~6mJ
CR=12
Fig 9. Compression achieved by P-BPBD CS and DWT for a
DWT CR=1.3 to ~215mJ to
fixed reconstruction loss% ~31ms
CR=7.7 830mJ
Fig. 10a-c shows the superior performance of our adaptive- Table 4. Energy overheads for P-BPBD CS are extremely low
CS algorithm. Fig. 10a represents the original signal, Fig. on 32MHz Intel® CurieTM compute module for ECG and PPG
10b shows the recovered signal using adaptive CS for PRD
constraint of 9% and Fig. 10c shows the recovered signal C. Joint CS De-noising and Reconstruction
for conventional Non-Adaptive CS with a CR of 5.
Fig. 11 shows the effectiveness of jointly optimizing noise
removal and signal recovery on an ECG corrupted with zero-
mean Gaussian noise (variance 0.2). The improvements in
Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in Table 5 is driven by both
BPBD structure and Law of Large Numbers which states
that sample mean tends towards true mean for large sample
(a)
sizes. BPBD logic averages out zero mean Gaussian noise
in the signal and renders the encoded noisy signal almost
same as encoded signal without any noise whatsoever.
Noisy ECG reconstruction @CR=6, Noisy ECG reconstruction @CR=6,
PRD=13.71 PRD=13.71
400 400
200 200
0 0
0 100 200 300 400 500
mV

0 100 200 300 400 500

mV
-200 -200
-400 -400

(b)
Original ECG Original ECG
-600 -600
Reconstructed ECG Reconstructed ECG
-800 -800
Sample number Sample number

(a) Noisy Input ECG (b) CS De-noised ECG

Fig.11. Example of CS based ECG de-noising

Noise Variance 0.10 0.20 0.30 0.40

Reconstructed SNR 16.46 2.23 2.56 0.77
(c)
Noisy Signal SNR 11.50 -0.08 -1.66 -3.06
Fig 10. Better reconstruction achieved by Adaptive CS for
a fixed PRD constraint Table 5. SNR improvements by CS De-Noising technique
Table 3 presents the CR and PRD for signal acquisition for different noise levels
using Adaptive CS and Non-Adaptive CS. As it can be seen, For the best real-time reconstruction on the gateway, we
adaptive CS switches to a lower CR to meet the PRD compared the performance of multiple algorithms. This
constraints set by the application. also included two greedy algorithms: AMP[14], OMP[11]
as well as an optimization based algorithm: Alternating
Waveform 1 Waveform 2 Waveform 3
Direction Method [12]. We evaluated these algorithms on a
Adaptive CS CR=3 CR=3 CR=4 laptop using 6 ECG datasets from QT Database, Physionet
PRD= 7.8% PRD=7.7% PRD=8.0% (Table 6).
Non- CR=5 CR=5 CR=5 In terms of recovery time, Alternating Direction Method is
Adaptive CS PRD= 16.9% PRD=13.8 % PRD=13.7% ~20X better than AMP and ~2X better than OMP. The
Table 3. Comparison of Adaptive and Non-Adaptive CS reconstruction accuracy between these algorithms is
comparable. AMP has worst reconstruction times amongst

340
all the algorithms because it required significantly more quality (PRD) constraint. Based on power performance
iterations to converge to a low error. characterization on Intel® Curie TM compute module, our
User Reconstruction Accuracy Reconstruction Times embedded P-BPBD algorithm is ~100X faster than DWT
PRD (%) (seconds) with energy consumption less than ~3% of that of DWT at
Alternating Alternating the same reconstruction loss. Further, for real time
AMP Direction OMP AMP Direction OMP monitoring we have demonstrated fast reconstruction using
1 Alternating Direction algorithm on Intel® Edison board.
8.72 8.10 8.78 0.523 0.023 0.049
2 For continuous ECG-PPG monitoring applications using
9.43 8.92 9.50 0.553 0.023 0.048
3
wearable sensors the P-BPBD-CS offers a compelling
14.52 13.86 14.57 0.546 0.023 0.048
alternative to the DWT.
4 7.27 7.68 7.33 0.537 0.023 0.0488
5
14.69 14.29 14.74 0.525 0.023 0.0503 VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
6
3.60 3.83 3.56 0.515 0.023 0.0491 The authors thank Mr. Kumar Ranganathan, Manager and
Table 6. Comparative performance of different Principal Engineer, Intel Labs for his extensive guidance
reconstruction algorithms presented for 6 users. on the project. We would like to thank our interns Nikita
Pendekanti, Krishna Karthick and Krishna Bhat for their
D. End-to-End CS System excellent efforts & significant contributions to this project.
We demonstrated an end-to-end system of our application by
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