Human Identification Using Compressed ECG Signals

As a result of the increased demand for improved life styles and the increment of senior citizens over the age of 65, new home care services are demanded. Simultaneously, the medical sector is increasingly becoming the new target of cybercriminals due the potential value of users' medical information. The use of biometrics seems an effective tool as a deterrent for many of such attacks. In this paper, we propose the use of electrocardiograms (ECGs) for the identification of individuals. For instance, for a telecare service, a user could be authenticated using the information extracted from her ECG signal. The majority of ECG-based biometrics systems extract information (fiducial features) from the characteristics points of an ECG wave. In this article, we propose the use of non-fiducial features via the Hadamard Transform (HT). We show how the use of highly compressed signals (only 24 coefficients of HT) is enough to unequivocally identify individuals with a high performance (classification accuracy of 0.97 and with identification system errors in the order of 10(-2)).