A Real Time Processing and Analysis of Watermarked ECG Signal in Remote Patient Monitoring Systems

Remote patient monitoring systems and Point-of-Care (PoC) technologies is gaining attention these days. These techniques reduce the medical labor cost and increasing traffic at hospitals. Most of the healthcare systems will collect ECG information on which the physiological readings are hidden and send to hospitals over internet. According to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) while sending medical information over internet it should follow certain guidelines. This is to ensure patients confidentiality and data security inside the communication channels as well as information stored on the hospital server. Through this paper a real time implementation of remote patient monitoring system is being proposed. The processing of data based on encryption and steganography techniques and security analysis being done. The proposed design of remote monitoring system with watermarked ECG signal ensuring high data security, privacy and confidentiality and the retrieval of the physiological readings from the watermarked ECG is being carried out successfully.