An automated patient authentication system for remote telecardiology

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) being the number one killer for many of the developed nations, real-time patient monitoring via the mobile phone network is increasingly becoming popular. The CVD patients, as subscribers for the CVD monitoring service providers, access to the facilities before initiating the dedicated services. However, this authentication must be secured, since the service providers often hold sensitive health information of their subscribers. In this paper, we propose a fully automated and integrated cardiovascular patient authentication system using patients ECG as a biometric entity. The proposed ECG recognition method is up to 12 time faster than existing ECG based biometric algorithms, requires up to 6.5 times less template storage, needs only 2.49 (average) acquisition time with the a high accuracy rate (up to 95%) when experimented a small population size of 15. With this new authentication mechanism in place, the cardiovascular patients no longer need to provide additional details like user name or password for identification purposes to access their health monitoring facility, making the remote tele-cardiology application faster than existing authentication approaches.