A Reconfigurable Wireless Environment for ECG Monitoring and Encryption

Connected health is the convergence of medical devices, security devices, and communication technologies. It enables patients to be monitored and treated remotely from their home or primary care facility rather than attend outpatient clinics or be admitted to hospital. Patients’ data and medical records within a connected health system should be securely transmitted and saved for further analysis and diagnosis. This paper presents a reconfigurable wireless system for electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring which can be deployed in a connected health environment. Efficient field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation for the ECG encryption block has been carried out on the RC10 prototyping board using the advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm. Results presented have shown that the proposed AES implementation outperforms the existing FPGA-based systems in different key performance metrics and that ECG signals acquired using the VitalSens device can be encrypted/decrypted in real-time. A software based evaluation approach has been also performed to validate the proposed hardware implementation. The proposed solution can be deployed for electronic archiving of health records information systems and health monitoring technologies in personalized medicine.