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Encryption of ECG signals for telemedicine applications

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Abstract

Multimedia security has been extensively used in content protection, image authentication, data hiding and signal encryption. Similarly, transmission of biomedical data or information remotely for healthcare applications should be secure. One of the important medical signals that need to be transmitted to healthcare centers is the Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. This paper is concerned mainly with ECG signal encryption for security applications. The paper presents three cryptosystems for ECG signal encryption based on the fusion of ECG signals with other masking signals that are rich in activities such as speech signals. The common thread between these cryptosystems is the operation on sample values of the ECG signal rather than adopting encoding and decoding schemes, and this saves much time and is more immune to both noise and hacking scenarios. The proposed cryptosystems are compared to the encryption technique that uses 1-D logistic map. The performances of the proposed cryptosystems are evaluated through simulation experiments in terms of histogram, structural similarity index, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), log-likelihood ratio, spectral distortion and correlation coefficient. It is clear from the experiments that the utilization of more levels of encryption increases the security.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Deanship of Scientific Research at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University through the Fast-track Research Funding Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, 84428, Saudi Arabia

    Abeer D. Algarni, Naglaa F. Soliman, Hanaa A. Abdallah & Fathi E. Abd El-Samie

  2. Department of Electronics and Communications, Faculty of Engineering, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt

    Naglaa F. Soliman & Hanaa A. Abdallah

  3. Department of Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University, Menouf, 32952, Egypt

    Fathi E. Abd El-Samie

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  1. Abeer D. Algarni
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Correspondence to Abeer D. Algarni.

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Algarni, A.D., Soliman, N.F., Abdallah, H.A. et al. Encryption of ECG signals for telemedicine applications. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 10679–10703 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09369-5

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