A Wavelet based Secured ECG Distribution Technique for Patient
Centric Approach



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INTRODUCTION
AFTER the commencement of Health Insurance
Portability Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) in US,
health information are highly expected to be secured [1,
2]. Since ECG signal contains sensitive health information
about the patient [3, 4], which might be useful to certain
organizations like health insurance companies, securing of
ECG before transmission to receiver is crucial. According to
the literature, one solution is to send patient identifier (not
patient name) along with the ECG signal [5]. This solution
was thought to be secured, since patient’s heart conditions
are not associated to the patient’s name. Therefore, even if
the ECG data is intercepted to a third party; they will not
have any clue about whose ECG signal they intercepted,
provided that the mapping between the patient name and
patient ID is contained in a secured server as in [5].
However, recent research in patient identification with the
ECG signal has successfully established ECG as a biometric
entity [6, 7]. With this valuable research in place, a single
ECG signal without any patient name will release both
cardiovascular details and person identification [6, 7]. The
resolution to this privacy issue is to encrypt the ECG signal.


SYSTEM and METHODOLOGY

ECG signal has its unique features represented by P wave,
QRS complex and T wave. If the ECG signal is represented
with a number of coefficient with wavelet decomposition,
and a limited set of coefficients is carefully extracted such
that the newly constructed trimmed ECG signal from the
remaining coefficients becomes featureless, then encryption
will be achieved. The selected (important) coefficients,
which represent the main features of ECG, are preserved
with standard Cryptographic cipher (e.g. RSA Symmetric
Cipher). Figure 2 demonstrates this process.


CONCLUSION
In this paper, we successfully employed two methods of
wavelet based ECG encryption technique, for the first time.
When the proposed encryption techniques are applied to a
patient centric architecture like Fig. 2, patients’ privacy is
protected as per the HIPAA guide lines. Moreover, faster
transmission is achieved due the benefit of higher
compression ratio of up to 2.81. This faster transmission is
greatly appreciated for remote telemonitoring, since ECG
file are generally enormous in size.