A new ECG obfuscation method: A joint feature extraction & corruption approach

With cardiovascular disease as the number one killer of modern era, ECG is collected, stored and transmitted in greater frequency than ever before. However, lack of existing research in secured ECG distribution forces patient privacy under serious threat. Moreover, without adopting secured ECG transmission and storage, HIPAA recommendations for patient privacy are being compromised. This paper presents a new ECG obfuscation method, which uses cross correlation based template matching approach to detect all ECG features followed by corruption of those features with added noises. Without the knowledge of the templates used for feature matching and the noise, the obfuscated features can not be reconstructed. Therefore, three templates and three noises for P wave, QRS Complex and T wave comprise the key, which is only 0.4%-0.9% of the original ECG file size. Only authored doctors possessing this key can reconstruct the original signal. Key distribution is extremely efficient and fast due to small size. Moreover, if the obfuscated ECG reaches to the wrong hand (hacker), it would appear as regular ECG without encryption. Therefore, traditional decryption techniques including powerful brute force attack are useless against this obfuscation. Finally, with unimaginably high number of noise combinations the security strength of the presented method is very high.