A wavelet based secured ECG distribution technique for patient centric approach

Electrocardiogram (ECG) provides detail condition of the heart of a cardiac patient. ECG also contains some features, which can serve as a biometric entity for identification of a particular patient. Therefore, when ECG is transmitted for remote telehealth application, it is susceptible to patient's privacy. Interception of ECG data may release patients overall condition to the wrong hand. To protect patients' privacy HIPAA regulations are in place. However, according to the literature, research related to the securing (encryption) is scarce. In this paper, we proposed two methods of ECG encryption and distribution for a patient centric telehealth application. Using wavelet decomposition techniques only important portion of the ECG signal is selected for encryption. The remaining ECG coefficients (wavelet decomposition) are uploaded to a public ECG repository. The doctor downloads the publicly available coefficients and uses the encrypted coefficients, which has already been distributed to him from the patient, to retrieve the original ECG. Apart from providing complete security, this architecture provides faster ECG transmission by achieving a high compression ratio of up to 2.81.