Securing Online Medical Data

One of the challenges in providing medical services over the network connections is maintaining authenticity and integrity of the data that are transmitted over the network and stored on remote servers. To provide critical medical services, data must be free from tempering. Medical data often also contain sensitive information, and therefore require a method to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information of patients. In this chapter, we illustrate how the methods developed for the protection of copyright can be used to achieve this. In particular, we illustrate how a watermarking scheme can be used for protecting breath sounds transmitted over the internet. We illustrate how this method can be used to insert encrypted source and identity information in breath sounds while maintaining significant biological signals for proper diagnosis. The method can be applied to any types of data including image, video, and sound data. We show experimental results to demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme obtains good robustness against common manipulation attacks and preserves imperceptivity. The performance comparison results verify that the scheme outperforms existing approaches in terms of robustness and imperceptibility.