Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York have devised a way to protect personal electronic health records by using a patient's own heartbeat.

According to researchers, the cost and complexity of traditional encryption approaches prevents them from being directly applied to telemedicine or mobile health care. Those systems are gradually replacing clinic-centered health care. The goal was to find a unique solution to protect sensitive personal health data with something simple, available and cost-effective.

Researchers have devised a new way to protect personal electronic health records using a patient's heartbeat.Traditional security measures—like cryptography or encryption—can be expensive, time-consuming, and computing-intensive. Binghamton researchers encrypted patient data using a person's unique electrocardiograph (ECG)—a measurement of the electrical activity of the heart measured by a biosensor attached to the skin—as the key to lock and unlock the files.

(Read "Biometric Security: Your Body as Your Password.")

The ECG signal is one of the most important and common physiological parameters collected and analyzed to understand a patient's' health. While ECG signals are collected for clinical diagnosis and transmitted through networks to electronic health records, researchers reused the ECG signals for the data encryption. Through this strategy, the security and privacy can be enhanced while minimum cost will be added, according to researchers.

Essentially, the patient's heartbeat is the password to access their electronic health records.

The identification scheme is a combination of previous work by researchers using a person's unique brainprint instead of traditional passwords for access to computers and buildings combined with cyber-security.

Since an ECG may change due to age, illness or injury—or a patient may just want to change how their records are accessed—researchers are currently working out ways to incorporate those variables.