Remote Healthcare Monitoring Systems (RHMs) that use ECG signals are very effective tools for the early diagnosis of various heart conditions. However, these systems are still confronted with a problem that reduces their efficiency, such as energy consumption in wearable devices because they are battery-powered and have limited storage. This paper presents a novel algorithm for the compression of ECG signals to reduce energy consumption in RHMs. The proposed algorithm uses discrete Krawtchouk moments as a feature extractor to obtain features from the ECG signal. Then the accelerated Ant Lion Optimizer (AALO) selects the optimum features that achieve the best-reconstructed signal. Our proposed algorithm is extensively validated using two benchmark datasets: MIT-BIH arrhythmia and ECG-ID. The proposed algorithm provides the average values of compression ratio (CR), percent root mean square difference (PRD), signal to noise ratio (SNR), Peak Signal to noise ratio (PSNR), and quality score (QS) are 15.56, 0.69, 44.52, 49.04 and 23.92, respectively. The comparison demonstrates the advantages of the proposed compression algorithm on recent algorithms concerning the mentioned performance metrics. It also tested and compared against other existing algorithms concerning Processing Time, compression speed and computational efficiency. The obtained results show that the proposed algorithm extremely outperforms in terms of (Processing Time = 6.89 s), (compression speed = 4640.19 bps) and (computational efficiency = 2.95). The results also indicate that the proposed compression algorithm reduces energy consumption in a wearable device by decreasing the wake-up time by 3600 ms.INDEX TERMS Remote healthcare monitoring, signal compression, electrocardiogram (ECG), energy efficiency, krawtchouk moments, Ant Lion Optimizer.

Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles under the following conditions: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-SA 4.0).