Ibaida Ayman, Khalil Ibrahim, Al-Shammary Dhiah
School of Computer Science and IT, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia.
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2010;2010:3891-4. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2010.5627671.
In Wireless tele-cardiology applications, ECG signal is widely used to monitor cardiac activities of patients. Accordingly, in most e-health applications, ECG signals need to be combined with patient confidential information. Data hiding and watermarking techniques can play a crucial role in ECG wireless tele-monitoring systems by combining the confidential information with the ECG signal since digital ECG data is huge enough to act as host to carry tiny amount of additional secret data. In this paper, a new steganography technique is proposed that helps embed confidential information of patients into specific locations (called special range numbers) of digital ECG host signal that will cause minimal distortion to ECG, and at the same time, any secret information embedded is completely extractable. We show that there are 2.1475 × 10(9) possible special range numbers making it extremely difficult for intruders to identify locations of secret bits. Experiments show that percentage residual difference (PRD) of watermarked ECGs can be as low as 0.0247% and 0.0678% for normal and abnormal ECG segments (taken from MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database) respectively.
在无线远程心脏监测应用中，心电图（ECG）信号被广泛用于监测患者的心脏活动。因此，在大多数电子健康应用中，ECG信号需要与患者的机密信息相结合。数据隐藏和水印技术在ECG无线远程监测系统中可以发挥关键作用，通过将机密信息与ECG信号相结合，因为数字ECG数据量足够大，可以作为载体来携带少量的额外秘密数据。本文提出了一种新的隐写技术，该技术有助于将患者的机密信息嵌入到数字ECG主机信号的特定位置（称为特殊范围数字），这将对ECG造成最小的失真，同时，嵌入的任何秘密信息都可以完全提取。我们表明，有2.1475×10（9）个可能的特殊范围数字，这使得入侵者极难识别秘密比特的位置。实验表明，对于正常和异常ECG片段（取自麻省理工学院 - 贝斯以色列女执事医疗中心心律失常数据库），水印ECG的百分比残留差异（PRD）分别可低至0.0247%和0.0678%。
