Patient Information Implantation and Reclamation From Compressed ECG Signal By LSB Watermarking Technique

In the application of telemedicine, ECG signal is transmitted to the Doctor end without any patient details. As a result, confusion is arisen between signal and patient’s identity. To avoid this confusion, ECG signals need to be combined with patient confidential information when sent. A typical ECG monitoring device generates massive volumes of digital data. Huge amount of bandwidth is required for the transmission of the ECG signal for telemedicine purposes. This huge amount of bandwidth for the transmission of the ECG signal can be avoided if the signal is compressed after embedding the patient’s personal information within the ECG signal. Since the ECG signal and the patient details integrated into one, bandwidth for the transmission can be reduced in telemedicine applications. In this paper ECG signals are watermarked with patient information using LSB watermark technique and compressed the huge amount of ECG data using ASCII character encoding in order to confirm patient or ECG linkage integrity and reduced the bandwidth in telemedicine applications. The whole module has been applied to various ECG data of all the 12 leads taken from PTB diagnostic database (PTB-DB) of physioNet and gives a highly compressed result that can be stored using far less digital space without distorting important ECG characteristics and at the same time, embedded information can be completely retrieved. Keywords— telemedicine, watermarked, ASCII character, PRD, SD, CR