A reversible and secure patient information hiding system for IoT driven e-health

•A framework for data security in mobile cloud platform developed.•Optimal Pixel Repetition based cover image generation instead of conventional interpolation, used, to achieve reversibility.•Pixel permutation is used to embed data and ensures histogram invariance between cover and stego-images.•Blind data extraction i.e., for the extraction of EPR from the stego-image, the original image is not required.•High embedding capacity of about 1.25 bpp is achieved.