ECG Steganography based privacy protection of medical datas for telemedicine application

Abstract

Over 20 million people worldwide have abnormal electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, i.e., arrhythmias, each year. Most of the cardiac patients are elders.And if they increasingly move to nursing homes, it is a necessary tendency to reduce the medical labor cost by deploying self-organized wireless cardiac- monitoring hardware/ software systems in an area with a radius of hundreds of feet. Such medical information networks could allow the doctors to immediately capture the arrhythmia events of any patient without leaving their offices. In this paper, a wavelet based steganography technique has been introduced which combines encryption and LSB embedding technique to protect patient confidential data.Huge amount of ECG signal collected by Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) from remote patients at homes will be transmitted along with other physiological readings such as blood pressure, temperature, glucose level etc. and diagnosed by those remote patient monitoring systems. An added benefit is the freedom of movement for patients due to the wireless networking technologies. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique on the ECG signal, distortion measurement metrics, the Percentage Residual Difference (PRD) has been used.