ECG Steganography to secure patient data in an E-Healthcare System

Abstract

E-healthcare systems are rapidly gaining importance with the evolution of remote monitoring devices for patient diagnosis. While transmitting patient classified information, it is essential to ensure that patient confidentiality is maintained. ECG signals are used as a medium to mask the patient's confidential data. ECG steganography is achieved by using Discrete Wavelet Transform along with Singular Value Decomposition. To assure that minimal distortion is reported after embedding the data, two distortion metrics namely, Percentage Residual Difference and Bit Error Rate are used. The proposal is implemented on MIT-BIH database and it has been observed that the proposed approach offers minimum distortion hence retaining the authenticity of the original signal.