Vitacode: Electrocardiogram representation for biometric cryptography in body area networks

This paper proposes a new representation of electrocardiogram (ECG) for biometric key distribution in body area networks, and investigates the experimental performance for ECG representations with various features in different modalities and different distance metrics. Other than the previous schemes using binary sequence, the proposed VitaCode represents the ECG features in a set with integer elements, which can be combined with the fuzzy biometric cryptography more effectively. Experimental results on the public domain PhysioBank database with 290 subjects show VitaCode can provide a more practical biometric representation basic for ECG-based secure communications in the promising body area healthcare networks.