Reversible Data Hiding Scheme for ECG Signal

In telemedicine system, remote electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring systems are widely used to examine the cardiac health of a patient. So, huge amount of ECG data is collected in real time and send over the network along with the patient's identity to his/her doctor who is geographically far away. In that scenario, it is very important to protect patient's confidential information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 in US mandates that confidential and private information related to patients be protected. To serve this purpose a novel reversible watermarking algorithm with high embedding capacity based on wavelet transform has been developed. The proposed reversible data hiding scheme allows ECG signals to hide its corresponding patient's confidential data and being reversible the original signal can be completely restored at the same time. Performance has been evaluated in terms of ECG signal distortion and embedding capacity. Experimental results show that the original ECG signal is recovered exactly after the extraction of watermarked data.