Robust Steganography in Non-QRS Regions of 2D ECG for Securing Patients' Confidential Information in E-Healthcare Paradigm

Abstract

The upsurge in the communication infrastructure and development in internet of things (IoT) has promoted e-healthcare services to provide remote assistance to homebound patients. It, however, increases the demand to protect the confidential information from intentional and unintentional access by unauthorized persons. This chapter is focused on steganography-based data hiding technique for ECG signal in which the selected ECG samples of non-QRS region are explored to embed the secret information. An embedding site selection (ESS) algorithm is designed to find the optimum embedding locations. The performance of the method is evaluated on the basis of statistical parameters and clinically supportive measures. The efficiency is measured in terms of embedding capacity and BER while key space measures its robustness. The implementation has been tested on standard MIT-BIH arrhythmia database of 2 mins and 5 mins duration and found that the proposed technique embarks the proficiency to securely hide the secret information at minimal distortion.