Low-Cost and Confidential ECG Acquisition Framework Using Compressed Sensing and Chaotic Systems for Wireless Body Area Network

Recent years have witnessed an increasing popularity of wireless body area network (WBAN), with which continuous collection of physiological signals can be conveniently performed for healthcare monitoring. Energy consumption is a critical issue because it directly affects the duration of the equipped sensors. In this article, we propose a low-cost and confidential electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition approach for WBAN. The compressed sensing (CS) is employed for low-cost signal acquisition, and its cryptographic features are exploited for promoting the framework's confidentiality. In particular, the RIPless measurement matrix is used to give CS the resistance against plaintext attack, while the first-order Σ∆ quantizer is employed to embed the cryptographic diffusion feature into the whole system. Two chaotic systems are employed for generating the required secret elements for the acquisition and encryption. Experiment results well demonstrate the signal reconstruction and security performance of the proposed framework.