Enabling Security for Healthcare Monitoring
Environment using Pervasive Computing
By
M.Sreemaa Assistant Professor/CSE, R.M.Jayasree M.E.CSE(final year)
Email-id: rmcjayasri91@gmail.com, contact: 9944381255
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Abstract:
Pervasive
computing
describes
ubiquitous computing environments that
provide anytime and anywhere access to
information services while making the
presence of the system invisible to the user.
The goal of this paper is to monitor the
remote patient’s health status and provide a
secure
healthcare
system
using
cryptography. The pervasive healthcare
applications include pervasive health
monitoring,
intelligent
emergency
management system, pervasive healthcare
data access, and ubiquitous mobile
telemedicine. Most of pervasive computing
devices have limited computing resources
like memory, processor speed, network
bandwidth, and are mostly battery powered
devices. Hence, these devices are not
capable
of
executing
cryptographic
algorithm. The biomedical data, collected by
wearable sensors will be transmitted using
cell phones towards the corresponding
Health Monitoring Centers via various
wireless networks. In this paper, we are
securing biomedical data by cryptography
via a remote agent.
Index Terms— Pervasive computing
security, Remote Agent, cryptography
I.
INTRODUCTION
The introduction of telecommunications
technologies in healthcare environment has
led to an increased accessibility to
healthcare providers, more efficient tasks
and processes, and a higher overall quality
of healthcare services. However, security is
an essential system requirement since many
patients have privacy concerns when it
comes to releasing their personal
information over the open wireless channels.
Many studies are found in areas such as
emergency telemedicine, home monitoring,
and transmission of medical records and
virtual hospitals. With the development of
mobile computing, one typical application is
mobile ad hoc networks (Mantes), which
allow their users to move randomly without
any pre-deployed infrastructure. Wearable
sensor devices are attached to patients and
healthcare sites, these sensors can monitor
patients at anytime and anywhere.
Traditional model for health management
consists of observing symptoms, visiting a
doctor,
getting
treatment.
Pervasive
healthcare aims to change this model into
one that provides healthcare facilities to
individuals anywhere and at any time. It
uses large-scale deployment of sensing and
communication technologies to monitor
patients continuously. This allows it to
deliver accurate health information to the
medical professionals, thereby stimulating
timely diagnosis and treatment for health
problems
Pervasive devices require secure
connections to each other, to ensure that the
information
they
provide
remains
confidential. Providing security in such
environment will be a critical task because
the devices used are too modest to handle
heavyweight Security algorithms like RSA,
DES etc. Until now, almost every type of
wireless device like sensor nodes, cell
phones, PDAs, Ad-hoc networking devices
etc. have been provided security through
these algorithms. In this paper we are using
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).this is
emerging as an attractive public-key
cryptosystem
for
mobile/wireless
environments. Compared to traditional
cryptosystems like RSA, ECC offers
equivalent security with smaller key sizes,
faster
computation,
lower
power
consumption, as well as memory and
bandwidth savings. This is especially useful
for mobile devices which are typically
limited in terms of their CPU, power and
network connectivity. A wearable medical
device can be described as an autonomous
system that performs a specified medical
action or operation, such as monitoring or
support, in collaboration with other devices
in a network. The primary functions of
wearable
sensors
normally
include
physiological
monitoring,
information
storage, data transmission and instruction
receiving. These devices can be directly
attached to either the human body or a piece
of clothing, and they thus support
continuous patient monitoring. Although
healthcare is areas on which people are
willing to spend a significant part of their
income, the amount of money that can be
spend on new treatment methods, the benefit
of which is mostly marginal, is certainly
limited.
Fig.1 wearable medical device
I.
PREVIOUS WORK
In agents for intrusion detection are
placed in every node of the mobile ad-hoc
network. These agents detect any anomaly
in the node by using local audit traces and
also communicate with agents of
neighboring nodes to detect distributed
attacks on the whole network. The focus in
this work is more on intrusions in mobile adhoc network routing .Protocols such as route
logic compromise and traffic pattern
distortion. The paper includes the detailed
description of Proposed Intrusion Detection
System based on Local Reputation Scheme.
The proposed System also includes concept
of Redemption and fading these are
mechanism that allow nodes previously
considered malicious to become a part of the
network again. The goal of our paper is to
monitor the remote patient’s health status
and provide a secure healthcare system
using cryptography. The biomedical data,
collected by wearable sensors will be
transmitted using cell phones towards the
corresponding Health Monitoring Centers
via various wireless networks. The Elliptic
Curve Cryptography (ECC) Algorithm is
used for cryptography. The benefits of using
ECC are linear scalability, low hardware
implementation cost, low band width
requirements, high device performance.
II.
PERVASIVE
HEALTHCARE
APPLICATIONS
The healthcare applications could be
divided among the Following categories:
prevention, healthcare maintenance and
checkups, short-term monitoring (or home
healthcare
monitoring),
long-term
monitoring (nursing home), personalized
healthcare monitoring, incidence detection
and
management,
and,
emergency
intervention, transportation and treatment. In
addition to the current applications such as
mobile telemedicine, several new healthcare
applications could become possible due to
the wireless and mobile technologies. Some
of these applications are:
1. Health-aware mobile devices would
detect certain conditions by the touch of a
user. Many of the portable medical devices
can be integrated in the handheld wireless
device. These would allow the detection of
pulse-rate, blood pressure, and level of
alcohol. With its analysis of known allergies
and medical conditions, the device could
alert healthcare emergency system.
2. Comprehensive health monitoring
services would allow patients to be
monitored at any time in any location, using
his/her medical history and current
conditions.
3. Intelligent Emergency Management
System could be designed using the
intelligence of and information from mobile
and wireless networks. This system would
be able to manage the large call volume
received due to a single accident or incident
and effectively manage the fleet of
emergency vehicles.
4. Pervasive lifestyle incentive management
could involve giving a small mobile micropayment to a user device every time the user
exercises or eats healthy food. This mobile
money can then be used for paying wireless
monthly charges, for donating to a charity of
user’s choice, or for paying healthcare
expenses. Such incentives can lead to
healthier individuals and thus reducing the
overall cost of healthcare.
IV.
PROPOSED APPROACH
Our proposed model, Pervasive Health
Monitoring (PHM) is designed by keeping
in mind the data integrity in health care
pervasive environment. The proposed model
operates in a computing environment
consisting of a server and router. Which is
connected to a remote ad-hoc network of
handheld or portable pervasive computing
devices (PDAs, laptop computers, and
mobile phones) and wearable sensor device?
Figure 2 shows the operating environment of
the PHM made up of remote laptop
computer, PDA, Mobile phones etc. The
Components of Biomedical Server (BMS)
are Remote Agent (RA), Registered BMS
generates a SAA to remind the patient for
his/her checkup date and Server Alarm Alert
(SAA), Medical Record Store (MRS)
database. The biomedical data, collected by
wearable sensors from patient will be
transmitted using cell phones towards the
corresponding Health Monitoring Centers
via various wireless networks. Therefore, we
propose a new scheme that provides the data
integrity and confidentiality. Our model is
for periodic monitoring of patients. All the
registered patient information is stored in
RPL with their periodic checkup dates.BMS
generates a SAA to remind the patient for
his/her checkup date. Now patient’s
wearable sensors collect the biomedical data
and send it to the pervasive device.
Meanwhile BMS generates RA to handle the
task of securing the data by cryptographic
algorithm. RA executes on BMS and
generates an .exe and RA sends this exe to
pervasive device .Now encrypted data is
transmitted via wireless network to BMS
and stored in MRS database. The purpose of
using remote agent is for the effective
utilization of the limited resources like
battery power, memory, and processor speed
available in the remote nodes. Auditing and
the availability of location information can
also help to improve other processes within
a hospital. Decisions are often based upon
information about the physical location of a
person or an object. For example, if a patient
gets into a critical condition, the system
could locate the patient and the nearest
doctor, and call her to the scene. Location is
also a basic feature in detecting context
knowledge about entities. Consider for
example a doctor in an operating room; it is
very likely that this particular physician is
currently busy and shouldn’t be contacted on
matters of low urgency.
Fig.2 Pervasive Healthcare Monitoring
System
A. Biomedical Server (BMS)
The BMS is a repository of Remote
Agent (RA), Registered Patient List (RPL)
and Server Alarm Alert (SAA), Medical
Record Store (MRS) database. It is
responsible for dispatching the RA to target
nodes. The object request broker module
within the BMS contains objects. These
objects are then responsible for creating an
RA and sending it to the pervasive device.
All the RAs originate and return finally to
the BMS.
B. Remote Agent
The Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)
Algorithm is implemented in remote
agent.ECC is emerging as an attractive
public-key cryptosystem for mobile/wireless
environments. Compared to traditional
cryptosystems like RSA, ECC offers
equivalent security with smaller key sizes,
faster
computation,
lower
power
consumption, as well as memory and
bandwidth savings. This is especially useful
for mobile devices which are typically
limited in terms of their CPU, power and
network connectivity. RA is implemented
with two modules with client and server to
perform elliptic curve cryptography.
Advantage of using an RA is that it can
function autonomously after it is dispatched
without any control from other components.
As are developed considering nodes like
PDAs and mobile phones that have OS,
memory and processor speed.
C. Server Alarm Alert (SAA)
BMS generates a SAA to remind the patient
for his/her checkup dates by accessing
Registered Patient List (RPL) which stores
the registered patient information with their
periodic checkup dates.
III.
ECC VERSUS CONVENTIONAL
CRYPTOSYSTEMS
ECC is emerging as an attractive publickey cryptosystem for mobile/wireless
environments, the other two being integer
factorization systems and discrete logarithm
systems. The RSA cryptosystem is the best
known example of the integer factorization
problem (IFP) while the Digital Signature
Algorithm (DSA) cryptosystem is based on
the discrete logarithm Problem (DLP). This
difference
between
conventional
Cryptosystems and ECC is that the keys
have much fewer bits than IFP and DLP
based applications. It also causes a large
difference in their running times. The
relative
computational
performance
advantage of ECC Versus RSA is not
indicated by the key sizes but by the cube of
the key sizes. The difference becomes even
more dramatic as an increase in RSA key
size leads to an even greater increase in
computational cost.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
WORK
AND
FUTURE
We have presented the architecture and
operation of Pervasive Health Monitoring
(PHM) based on cryptographic approach on
remote agents technology for a network of
pervasive computing devices. in our work
we proposed the usage of lightweight mobile
software entities called remote agent. The
main advantage of this approach is that
remote agents can execute ECC algorithm
and generates cipher text on pervasive
device with limited computing resources
with sufficient memory and CPU speed. The
major benefits of using ECC are linear
scalability, low hardware implementation
cost, low band width requirements, high
device performance etc. In future, we will
extend this prototype by provided biometrics
based authentication.
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