A lossless compression and encryption mechanism for remote monitoring of ECG data using Huffman coding and CBC-AES

Abstract

Biomedical signal processing provides a cross-disciplinary international forum through which research on signal and images measurement and analysis of clinical medicine and biological sciences are shared. The broadcast transmission in wireless body area networks raises serious security challenge when employed in biomedical applications. Electrocardiography (ECG) signal is frequently used for diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. However, the ECG data need a large memory storage device due to continuous heart rate logs and vital parameter storage. Thus, compression schemes are applied to the ECG data before sending them to telemedicine centers for monitoring and analysis. Therefore, a proper compression mechanism cannot only improve the storage efficiency but also help in the rapid data transfer from one device to another due to its compact size. We propose a scheme using buffer blocks, peak detection, compression, and encryption mechanism to enable seamless and secure transmission of ECG signal from the sensor to the monitor. The study will prove that the quality of the reconstructed signals obtained using the proposed scheme, which uses discrete wavelet transform, Huffman coding, and Cipher Block Chaining-Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm approach, is superior to that obtained using unencrypted compression. Furthermore, the proposed system can provide quality-control compressed data, although the data have been encrypted. The experimental results show that the proposed system provides an effective means for assuring data security and compression performance for ECG data storage and transmission. The security of the scheme is applied against known attacks on privacy, such as eavesdropping and passive monitoring attack.