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The continuous advancement in computer and communication technologies has made personalized healthcare monitoring a rapidly growing area of interest. New features and services are envisaged, raising users' expectations in healthcare services. The emergence of Internet of Things brings people closer to connect the physical world to the Internet. In this paper, we present embedded services that are part of a ubiquitous healthcare system that allows automated and intelligent monitoring. The system uses IP connectivity and the Internet for end-to-end communication, from each 6LoWPAN sensor nodes to the web user interface on the Internet. The proposed algorithm in the Gateway performs multithreaded processing on the gathered medical signals for conversion to real data, feature extraction and wireless display. The user interface at the server allows users to access and view the medical data from mobile and portable devices. The ubiquitous system is exploring possibilities in connecting Internet with things and people for health services.

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One of the major issues in time-critical medical applications using wireless technology is the size of the payload packet, which is generally designed to be very small to improve the transmission process. Using small packets to transmit continuous ECG data is still costly. Thus, data compression is commonly used to reduce the huge amount of ECG data transmitted through telecardiology devices. In this paper, a new ECG compression scheme is introduced to ensure that the compressed ECG segments fit into the available limited payload packets, while maintaining a fixed CR to preserve the diagnostic information. The scheme automatically divides the ECG block into segments, while maintaining other compression parameters fixed. This scheme adopts discrete wavelet transform (DWT) method to decompose the ECG data, bit-field preserving (BFP) method to preserve the quality of the DWT coefficients, and a modified running-length encoding (RLE) scheme to encode the coefficients. The proposed dynamic compression scheme showed promising results with a percentage packet reduction (PR) of about 85.39% at low percentage root-mean square difference (PRD) values, less than 1%. ECG records from MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database were used to test the proposed method. The simulation results showed promising performance that satisfies the needs of portable telecardiology systems, like the limited payload size and low power consumption.

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