A compression method, based on the choice of a wavelet that minimizes the distortion of compression for each electrocardiogram considered, is proposed in this paper. The scaling filter used on the determination of the wavelet function is obtained from the resolution of an optimization problem, which is unconstrained since the scaling filter is parametrized in a way that the constraints applied to the scaling filter are embedded on the parameters. The coefficients of projection of the signal over the wavelet subspaces are calculated and only the most significant ones are retained, being the significant coefficients determined in order to satisfy a pre-specified distortion measure. The bitmap that informs the positions of the retained coefficients is encoded along with the values of the coefficients by using an improved version of the Run Length Encoding technique. Experiments that compare the proposed approach with other techniques illustrate the efficiency of the method.35145-53