A New Approach for Secure Cloud-Based Electronic Health Record and its Experimental Testbed

Jusak Jusak,Qiang Fang,Seedahmed S Mahmoud,Roy Laurens,Musleh Alsulami

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3138135

Abstract

The tremendous development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology in the last decades has fostered advancement in automatic medical assistive devices to support the existing Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. As an integral part of the EHR electronic model, public cloud servers store medical data. Unfortunately, public cloud servers are prone to security and privacy breach. This paper introduces a novel non-cryptographic approach to preserve electrocardiograph (ECG) data confidentiality and integrity in the EHR environment. The main objective of the proposed anonymization algorithm is to obscure the patient’s cardiac information during transmission and to protect information stored in the cloud database. Although we focus on ECG data, generalization to other types of clinical data can be derived using the proposed method. Performance evaluation of the proposed scheme showed that the algorithm conceals both fiducial and non-fiducial features of the data. Therefore, confidentiality feature is preserved. This paper examined confidentiality of the anonymized data using the Percentage Residual Difference (PRD) and investigated the integrity of the reconstructed data in terms of cross-correlation. Security analysis carried out using the PRD, brute force attack, and performance comparison between the proposed algorithm and existing methods. Evaluation showed that the proposed scheme offers a secure non-cryptographic model for transmission and storing clinical data in the cloud. Moreover, in terms of processing time, the proposed algorithm is ten times faster than the existing wavelet packet method when processing long ECG data, 65,536 sample points. In a real-time experimental testbed, the implemented proposed system was successful.

Highlights

With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the development of medical Internet-based applications and devices, we have witnessed remarkable progress over the last two decades [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The main objective of the proposed algorithm is to obscure patient’s cardiac information during transmission of ECG data and to protect information storing in the cloud database of the Electronic Health Records (EHR) environment
Simulations and comparisons with existing methods were used to observe the performance of the proposed algorithm. Both time domain representation and frequency domain representation of the ECG data were evaluated in terms of power spectral density (PSD)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the development of medical Internet-based applications and devices, we have witnessed remarkable progress over the last two decades [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The proliferation of the current information and communication technology has changed the way medical data recorded and stored. These medical data may include several personal medical data such as: medical histories and medication and laboratory test results. Each block is digitally signed by cryptographic hashes and validated by network peers Due to this chain structure, blockchain can be a secure way of storing medical records [20]. The main objective of the proposed algorithm is to obscure patient’s cardiac information during transmission of ECG data and to protect information storing in the cloud database of the EHR environment. The ECG data is anonymized using signal processing algorithms, and stored in the cloud system as a secure data.

RELATED WORKS

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

CONCLUSION