Towards a Cooperative Security System for Mobile-Health Applications

[EN] Mobile Health (m-Health) system architectures are typically based on mobile and wireless communications, and use mobile devices with data exchange supported by Web Services (WS). Although m-Health systems offer mobility as a potential and precious resource they also present several challenged issues and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. Furthermore, constant mobility and often-required Internet connectivity also exposes and compromises the privacy and confidentiality of the m-Health system information. This paper proposes a novel data encryption solution for mobile health systems, considering a novel and early-proposed cooperation strategy. This encryption solution, called data encryption for mobile health applications (DE4MHA), tries to guarantee the best confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of m-health systems users data. The paper also presents a performance evaluation study comparing the performance an m-Health application with and without the DE4MHA.This work has been partially supported by National Funding from the FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia through the PEst-OE/EEI/LA0008/2013 Project; by the AAL4ALL (Ambient Assisted Living for All), project co-funded by COMPETE under FEDER via QREN Programme; by Brazilian National Council for Research and Development (CNPq) via Grant No. 309335/2017-5; and by FINEP, with resources from Funttel, Grant No. 01.14.0231.00, under the Centro de Referencia em Radiocomunicacoes - CRR project of the Instituto Nacional de Telecomunicacoes (Inatel), Brazil.Silva, BM.; Rodrigues, JJPC.; Canelo, F.; Lopes, IMC.; Lloret, J. (2019). Towards a Cooperative Security System for Mobile-Health Applications. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications. 19(3):629-654. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-014-9154-362965419

Performance evaluation of cooperation strategies for m-health services and applications

Health telematics are becoming a major improvement for patients’ lives, especially for disabled, elderly, and chronically ill people. Information and communication technologies have rapidly grown along with the mobile Internet concept of anywhere and anytime connection. In this context, Mobile Health (m-Health) proposes healthcare services delivering, overcoming geographical, temporal and even organizational barriers. Pervasive and m-Health services aim to respond several emerging problems in health services, including the increasing number of chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs in existing national health services, the need to empower patients and families to self-care and manage their own healthcare, and the need to provide direct access to health services, regardless the time and place. Mobile Health (m- Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy, and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. Architectures based on mobile devices and wireless communications presents several challenged issues and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. In this sense, cooperation-based approaches are presented as a solution to solve such limitations, focusing on increasing network connectivity, communication rates, and reliability. Cooperation is an important research topic that has been growing in recent years. With the advent of wireless networks, several recent studies present cooperation mechanisms and algorithms as a solution to improve wireless networks performance. In the absence of a stable network infrastructure, mobile nodes cooperate with each other performing all networking functionalities. For example, it can support intermediate nodes forwarding packets between two distant nodes. This Thesis proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications. This reputation-based scheme uses a Web-service to handle all the nodes reputation and networking permissions. Its main goal is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. Therefore resolving the above mentioned network problems and resulting in a major improvement for m-Health network architectures performances. A performance evaluation of this proposal through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating this cooperative scheme using a real m-Health application is presented. A cryptography solution for m-Health applications under cooperative environments, called DE4MHA, is also proposed and evaluated using the same real network scenario and the same m-Health application. Finally, this work proposes, a generalized cooperative application framework, called MobiCoop, that extends the incentive-based cooperative scheme for m-Health applications for all mobile applications. Its performance evaluation is also presented through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating MobiCoop using different mobile applications

Succesfaktorer og adfærdsmæssige konsekvenser

Som en funktion af den digitaliserede verden vi lever i og idéen om et kontantløst samfund, har vi i de seneste år oplevet hvordan fænomenet mobile betalinger er vokset. Arbejdet med at skabe elektroniske betalingssystemer til implementering i situationer hvor kontanter typisk har været anvendt, har stået på hen over de sidste 20-30 år, og mens mange forsøg har slået helt eller delvist fejl, har vi i Danmark siden 2013 kunne betale med den succesfulde mobilbetalings-app MobilePay. Formålet med denne afhandling er at bidrage med empirisk baseret viden om hvilke faktorer der har bidraget til udbredelsen af mobile betalinger i Danmark, samt at afdække nogle af de adfærdsmæssige konsekvenser af at vi nu kan overføre penge ved hjælp af mobile betalinger. Afhandlingen præsenterer således; en kortlægning af de historiske forhold der går forud for, samt de forhold der omgiver mobile betalinger i Danmark; en forklaring af hvordan to udbydere af mobile betalinger har arbejdet med undersøgelse, udvikling og markedsføring af deres løsninger; samt et eksplorativt studie af brugeroplevelser af mobile betalinger i brugthandel. I afhandlingens tredje del opsummeres de analytiske resultater i et forklarende narrativ, og efter afhandlingens konklusion præsenteres en række implikationer for forskning og erhvervsliv samt forslag til fremtidige studier