This paper presents an adaptive sampling method for electrocardiogram (ECG) signal detection. First, by employing the strings matching process with compression dictionary, we recognize each segment of ECG with different characteristics. Then, based on the non-uniform sampling strategy, the sampling rate is determined adaptively. As the results of simulation indicated, our approach reconstructed the ECG signal at an optimized sampling rate with the guarantee of ECG integrity. Compared with the existing adaptive sampling technique, our approach acquires an ECG signal at a 30% lower sampling rate. Finally, the experiment exhibits its superiority in terms of energy efficiency and memory capacity performance.