Projecte realitazat en col.laboració amb Linköpings Universitet

With the development of multimedia and digital systems there is a need to reduce the cost of storage and transmission of information. The storage requirements for long signals like 24-hour heart monitoring are very large so signal compression is often employed. The cost reduction achieved through compression leads to a reduction in the amount of data that represents the information. At the same time, once the decompression procedure is done, the resulting signal must contain enough detail for the cardiologist to be able to identify irregularities. \Lossy"compressors may hide such details, whereas \lossless" compressor preserves the signal exactly as captured. This thesis researches into the performance of several lossless compression algorithms widely used for image coding. The di erent compression techniques are evaluated not only in terms of compression ratio and compression and decompression bandwidths achieved but also based on their performance when the compressed data must be sent over any of the available wireless networks. This thesis documents the work of a master's degree project carried out during the spring of 2009. The project is part of a research project within the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Link opings Universitet. The project aims at researching and developing a data compression model for transmitting medical signals. The model should be feasible and it should prove the advantages of data compression. These implementations are intended to be used within a larger system allowing a patient to transmit medical data from a remote location.