Title: Secure health assistance in a ward-based pervasive environment

Authors: V.R. Sarma Dhulipala; M.S. Udhaya

Addresses: Department of Physics, Anna University, BIT Campus, Tiruchirappalli – 620 024, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Information Technology, SKP Engineering College, Tiruvannamalai – 606 611, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: Healthcare monitoring and its maintenance are on the rise in modern pervasive environment. Pervasive computing is a recent technology which is the integration of virtual and physical environment that is indistinguishable from everyday life. Body sensor network (BSN) supports continuous monitoring of physiological signals of patients in a hospital environment with real-time updates of medical records from the database via internet. Data shared by BSN has to be secured and made confidential. The wireless message transfer in BSN makes it more vulnerable for attacks. In this paper, the essential security provisioning to data sharing using a novel architecture is discussed along with data and key management in ward-based scenario of a hospital environment. The security provisioning is tested with elliptic curve cryptography. This technique is proved superior to the existing techniques in our simulation experiments.

Keywords: elliptic curve cryptography; ECC; body sensor networks; BSNs; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; pervasive healthcare; network security; secure health assistance; hospital wards; healthcare monitoring; pervasive computing; physiological signals; patient monitoring; medical record updates; medical records; internet; data sharing; healthcare technology; hospital security; data security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTMCP.2015.069473

International Journal of Telemedicine and Clinical Practices, 2015 Vol.1 No.1, pp.64 - 76

Accepted: 02 Mar 2014
Published online: 18 May 2015 *

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