A new real-time compression method for electrocardiogram (ECG) signals has been developed based on the wavelet transform approach. Themethod is specifically adaptable for packetized telecardiology applications. The signal is segmented into beats and a beat template is subtracted from them, producing a residual signal. Beat templates and residual signals are coded with a wavelet expansion. Compression is achieved by selecting a subset of wavelet coefficients. The number of selected coefficients depends on a threshold which has different definitions depending on the operational mode of the coder. Compression performance has been tested using a subset of ECG records from MIT-BIH
Arrhythmia database. This method has been designed for realtime packetized telecardiology scenarios both inwired andwireless environments.