Digital Watermarking of ECG Data for Secure Wireless Commuication

Use of wireless technology has made the bio-medical data vulnerable to attacks like tampering, hacking etc. This paper proposes the use of digital watermarking to increase the security of an ECG signal transmitted through a wireless network. A low frequency chirp signal is used to embed watermark which is patient's identification taken as 15 digit code. The characteristic of the proposed watermarking scheme is that the blind recovery of the watermark is possible at the receiver and the embedded watermark can be fully removed. Hence, ECG can be viewed by a clinician with zero distortion which is an essential requirement for bio-medical data. Further, tampering such as noise addition and filtering attack can also be detected at the receiver.