Researchers at Binghamton
University, State University of New York have devised a new way to protect
personal electronic health records using a patient's own heartbeat.
"The cost and
complexity of traditional encryption solutions prevent them being directly
applied to telemedicine or mobile healthcare. Those systems are gradually
replacing clinic-centered healthcare, and we wanted to find a unique solution
to protect sensitive personal health data with something simple, available and
cost-effective," said Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor in the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Thomas J. Watson School of
Engineering and Applied Science at Binghamton University. Jin is the co-author
of a new paper titled "A Robust and Reusable ECG-based Authentication and
Data Encryption Scheme for eHealth Systems."
Traditional security
measures -- like cryptography or encryption -- can be expensive,
time-consuming, and computing-intensive. Binghamton researchers encrypted
patient data using a person's unique electrocardiograph (ECG) -- a measurement
of the electrical activity of the heart measured by a biosensor attached to the
skin -- as the key to lock and unlock the files.
"The ECG signal is
one of the most important and common physiological parameters collected and
analyzed to understand a patient's' health," said Jin. "While ECG
signals are collected for clinical diagnosis and transmitted through networks
to electronic health records, we strategically reused the ECG signals for the
data encryption. Through this strategy, the security and privacy can be
enhanced while minimum cost will be added."
Essentially, the
patient's heartbeat is the password to access their electronic health records.
The identification scheme
is a combination of previous work by Jin using a person's unique brainprint
instead of traditional passwords for access to computers and buildings combined
with cyber-security work from Guo and Chen.
"This research will
be very helpful and significant for next-generation secure, personalized
healthcare," said Jin.
Since an ECG may change
due to age, illness or injury -- or a patient may just want to change how their
records are accessed -- researchers are currently working out ways to
incorporate those variables.
Assistant Professor Linke
Guo and Associate Professor Yu Chen, along with PhD candidates Pei Huang and
Borui Li, are co-authors of the paper.
The research was
presented at The IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2016) in
Washington, D.C., in December 2016.
The work is supported by
Binghamton University's Interdisciplinary Collaboration Grant (ICG) program.
Source: Science Daily
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