An electrocardiogram (ECG) signal inherits private information about a particular patient. Therefore in the current online healthcare platform, a secure transmission and storage in the public repository is imperative. Furthermore, a limited power devices for recording and transmitting ECG signal requires low computation algorithm to anonymize the signal. To deal with this specific requirement, in this paper, we propose a fast Fourier transform (FFT) – based ECG anonymization approach to secure the transmission of the ECG signal. Performance evaluation over processing time showed that the proposed algorithm inherited lower processing time compared to the recently proposed wavelet packet-based algorithm. Additionally, processing time of the proposed framework remains the same for several variations of the secret key length. Therefore, the proposed framework offers flexibility for the application to choose the length of secret key in the ECG anonymization phase.

Keywords—ecg signal, fast fourier transform, anonymization, security.