%0 Journal Article %T A Lossless Multichannel Bio-Signal Compression Based on Low-Complexity Joint Coding Scheme for Portable Medical Devices %A Dong-Sun Kim %A Jin-San Kwon %J Sensors %P 17516-17529 %D 2014 %I MDPI AG %R 10.3390/s140917516 %X Research on real-time health systems have received great attention during recent years and the needs of high-quality personal multichannel medical signal compression for personal medical product applications are increasing. The international MPEG-4 audio lossless coding (ALS) standard supports a joint channel-coding scheme for improving compression performance of multichannel signals and it is very efficient compression method for multi-channel biosignals. However, the computational complexity of such a multichannel coding scheme is significantly greater than that of other lossless audio encoders. In this paper, we present a multichannel hardware encoder based on a low-complexity joint-coding technique and shared multiplier scheme for portable devices. A joint-coding decision method and a reference channel selection scheme are modified for a low-complexity joint coder. The proposed joint coding decision method determines the optimized joint-coding operation based on the relationship between the cross correlation of residual signals and the compression ratio. The reference channel selection is designed to select a channel for the entropy coding of the joint coding. The hardware encoder operates at a 40 MHz clock frequency and supports two-channel parallel encoding for the multichannel monitoring system. Experimental results show that the compression ratio increases by 0.06%, whereas the computational complexity decreases by 20.72% compared to the MPEG-4 ALS reference software encoder. In addition, the compression ratio increases by about 11.92%, compared to the single channel based bio-signal lossless data compressor. %K biosensor %K multichannel bio-signals %K joint coding %K medical device %U http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/14/9/17516