Data Confidentiality in Healthcare Monitoring Systems Based on Image Steganography to Improve the Exchange of Patient Information Using the Internet of Things

Abstract

Recently, with the availability of fast and reliable Internet, the distance between a patient and a doctor is becoming unimportant. Physicians will be able to request the medical images of their patients regardless of the geographical area. However, a lot of challenges face such successful implementation. To facilitate remote diagnosis, patient electronic medical record (EMR), including medical images, that originates in one system needs to be exchanged either within the same organization or across different organizations. Steganography is the practice of concealing a secret message inside a cover medium. In this paper, steganography will be used to embed the patient’s personal information securely and imperceptibly in their medical images to enhance confidentiality in case of a distant diagnosis. The security of the medical data is improved to maintain confidentiality and integrity using IoT. The least significant bit of the approximate coefficient of integer wavelet transform is proposed. The distortion between the cover image and stego-image is obtained by measuring the mean square error and PSNR, and normalized cross-correlation is utilized to estimate the degree of closeness between the cover image and stego-image.