Pervasive eHealth services a security and privacy risk awareness survey

The human factor is often recognised as a major aspect of cyber-security research. Risk and situational perception are identified as key factors in the decision making process, often playing a lead role in the adoption of security mechanisms. However, risk awareness and perception have been poorly investigated in the field of eHealth wearables. Whilst end-users often have limited understanding of privacy and security of wearables, assessing the perceived risks and consequences will help shape the usability of future security mechanisms. This paper present a survey of the the risks and situational awareness in eHealth services. An analysis of the lack of security and privacy measures in connected health devices is described with recommendations to circumvent critical situations

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

THE INTERNET OF THINGS (IOT) IN DISASTER RESPONSE

Disaster management is a complex practice that relies on access to and the usability of critical information to develop strategies for effective decision-making. The emergence of wearable internet of things (IoT) technology has attracted the interests of several major industries, making it one of the fastest-growing technologies to date. This thesis asks, How can disaster management incorporate wearable IoT technology in operations and decision-making practices in disaster response? How IoT is applied in other prominent industries, including construction, manufacturing and distribution, the Department of Defense, and public safety, provides a basis for furthering its application to challenges affecting agency coordination. The critical needs of disaster intelligence in the context of hurricanes, structural collapses, and wildfires are scrutinized to identify gaps that wearable technology could address in terms of information-sharing in multi-agency coordination and the decision-making practices that routinely occur in disaster response. Last, the specifics of wearable technology from the perspective of the private consumer and commercial industry illustrate its potential to improve disaster response but also acknowledge certain limitations including technical capabilities and information privacy and security.Civilian, Virginia Beach Fire Department / FEMA - USAR VATF-2Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

A Reference Architecture Proposal for Secure Data Management in Mobile Health

Mobile health (mHealth) is becoming a prominent component of healthcare. As the border between wearable consumer devices and medical devices begins to thin, we extend the mHealth definition including sports, lifestyle, and wellbeing apps that may connect to smart bracelets and watches as well as medical device apps running on consumer platforms and dedicated connected medical devices. This trend raises security and privacy concerns, since these technologies collect data ubiquitously and continuously, both on the individual user and on the surroundings. Security issues include lack of authentication and authorization mechanisms, as well as insecure data transmission and storage. Privacy issues include users' lack of control on data flow, poor quality consent management, and limitations on the possibility to remain anonymous. In response to these threats, we propose an advanced reference platform, securing the use of wearables and mobile apps in the mHealth domains through citizens' active protection and information

Situational awareness through IoT sensors : A smart healthcare system as a use case

Emerging technologies of the Internet of Things are getting increasingly significant and to some extent essential as well to the society we are living in. These technologies have shown ability over the time to be implemented in a number of different fields, for instance, Smart Home, Smart Building, Smart City, Smart Retail, Smart Supply Chain, Smart Farming, Smart Grid, Industrial Internet and many more. Incorporation of Internet of Things technologies in the healthcare sector has potential to benefit not only medical related enterprises but at the same time it can improve the overall health and well-being of individuals as well. The deployment of IoT integrated systems has to deal with fairly heterogeneous environments that consist of a large number of sensors and actuators which all can be quite different from one another in many aspects. For example, they can use different operating systems and can have different hardware architecture. Such sensors are sometimes used for situational awareness of the surrounding and for making the individuals interact better with their environment. Such variety of applications and tasks poses a problem for system designers and developers on the choice of the most suitable technology to be employed to accomplish a specific task. This thesis explores the potential of Internet of Things technologies in the medical sector. We used analytical hierarchical process to have a kind of situational awareness through IoT technologies. As an use case, a healthcare system was considered for elderly people with neurological problems who need special care – people suffering with dementia for example. At the same time we have taken into account for the proposed system that it would enable regular people track and monitor their usual activities with a focus on improving the quality of life and enhancing their overall wellbeing. It is of prime importance for the system designers and developers that they have an idea about the potential IoT technologies and applications that can help this cause. We have considered eleven different IoT technologies to select from for the proposed paradigm. The decision of selecting the most appropriate technology obviously depends upon different criteria. Every IoT technology has its pros and cons. According to the needs of the proposed healthcare system, we have constructed a multi-criteria hierarchical model to assess the potential of those eleven IoT technologies for the healthcare system and chosen the best one based on set criteria and sub criteria. A 4-tier Analytical Hierarchical model is used to compare those technologies in terms of their quality of service or effectiveness, their acceptability and from the cost perspective. These criteria are then further divided into sub-criteria and the technologies are compared with respect to these ten sub-criteria to have a more thorough and comprehensive analysis. For these comparisons, quantitative data were collected from the internet including IEEE articles, and some of the comparisons are purely subjective. The results indicate that wide-area low-power solutions show more potential for the proposed healthcare system than other IoT technologies which we used for comparison, and SigFox tops the table. Also WiFi solutions have shown significant potential. But again, every technology has its shortcomings as well. Further studies are needed to see if we can somehow make a hybrid healthcare system that utilizes multiple IoT technologies and incorporate the plus points of all of them into the system; such future system can prove to be revolutionary in the medical care

Wearable Computing for Defence Automation : Opportunities and Challenges in 5G Network

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

ECHO Information sharing models

As part of the ECHO project, the Early Warning System (EWS) is one of four technologies under development. The E-EWS will provide the capability to share information to provide up to date information to all constituents involved in the E-EWS. The development of the E-EWS will be rooted in a comprehensive review of information sharing and trust models from within the cyber domain as well as models from other domains

A Study into Detecting Anomalous Behaviours within HealthCare Infrastructures

The theft of medical data, which is intrinsically valuable, can lead to loss of patient privacy and trust. With increasing requirements for valuable and accurate information, patients need to be confident that their data is being stored safely and securely. However, medical devices are vulnerable to attacks from the digital domain, with many devices transmitting data unencrypted wirelessly to electronic patient record systems. As such, it is now becoming more necessary to visualise data patterns and trends in order identify erratic and anomalous data behaviours. In this paper, a system design for modelling data flow within healthcare infrastructures is presented. The system assists information security officers within healthcare organisations to improve the situational awareness of cyber security risks. In addition, a visualisation of TCP Socket Connections using real-world network data is put forward, in order to demonstrate the framework and present an analysis of potential risks

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Mobile Technology Deployment Strategies for Improving the Quality of Healthcare

Ineffective deployment of mobile technology jeopardizes healthcare quality, cost control, and access, resulting in healthcare organizations losing customers and revenue. A multiple case study was conducted to explore the strategies that chief information officers (CIOs) used for the effective deployment of mobile technology in healthcare organizations. The study population consisted of 3 healthcare CIOs and 2 healthcare information technology consultants who have experience in deploying mobile technology in a healthcare organization in the United States. The conceptual framework that grounded the study was Wallace and Iyer\u27s health information technology value hierarchy. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and document reviews, followed by within-case and cross-case analyses for triangulation and data saturation. Key themes that emerged from data analysis included the application of disruptive technology in healthcare, ownership and management of mobile health equipment, and cybersecurity. The healthcare CIOs and consultants emphasized their concern about the lack of cybersecurity in mobile technology. CIOs were reluctant to deploy the bring-your-own-device strategy in their organizations. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential for healthcare CIOs to emphasize the business practice of supporting healthcare providers in using secure mobile equipment deployment strategies to provide enhanced care, safety, peace of mind, convenience, and ease of access to patients while controlling costs