A Novel Authentication Biometric for Pacemakers

Pacemakers are devices used to regulate heart rate in individuals with abnormal heart rhythms. They are often paired with a programmer, which can receive data from and send commands to them. The goal of this work is to explore a new biometric-based authentication layer to pacemaker-programmer communication. In this paper we present our work on exploring the fusion of pacemaker electrogram and externally-measured cardiac rhythm (electrocardiogram, plethysmogram) as biometrics for authenticating a programmer to a pacemaker. In this preliminary work we use Right Ventricular Electrogram (RV EGM) signal from the pacemaker and Atrial Electrogram (Atrial EGM) as a proxy for the externally measured cardiac rhythm (particularly ECG) to show the feasibility of our approach, achieving an accuracy rate of ~92%.