A Wavelet Based ECG Steganography for Protecting Patient Confidential Information in Point-of-Care Systems

With the growing number of aging population and a significant portion of that suffering from it is conceivable that remote ECG patient monitoring systems are expected to be widely used as Point-of-Care (PoC) applications in hospitals around the, huge amount of ECG signal collected by Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) from remote patients at homes will be transmitted such as blood pressure, temperature, glucose level etc along with other physiological readings. If the diagnosed by those remote patient monitoring systems are important that patient confidentiality it is protected while data is being transmitted over the public network as well as when they are stored in hospital servers used in this paper by remote monitoring systems and the wavelet based steganography technique has been introduced which combines encryption and scrambling technique to protect patient confidential data to be allows ECG signal to hide its corresponding patient confidential data and other physiological information thus guaranteeing the integration between ECG and the effectiveness of the proposed techniques for the two distortion measurement metrics have been used: the Wavelet Weighted PRD (WWPRD) and the Percentage Residual Difference (PRD). It is found that the proposed technique provides high security protection for patients data with low (less than 1% ) distortion and ECG data remains diagnosable after watermarking and as well as after watermarks are removed from the watermarked data.