Towards fog-driven IoT eHealth:Promises and challenges of IoT in medicine and healthcare

Internet of Things (IoT) offers a seamless platform to connect people and objects to one another for enriching and making our lives easier. This vision carries us from compute-based centralized schemes to a more distributed environment offering a vast amount of applications such as smart wearables, smart home, smart mobility, and smart cities. In this paper we discuss applicability of IoT in healthcare and medicine by presenting a holistic architecture of IoT eHealth ecosystem. Healthcare is becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to insufficient and less effective healthcare services to meet the increasing demands of rising aging population with chronic diseases. We propose that this requires a transition from the clinic-centric treatment to patient-centric healthcare where each agent such as hospital, patient, and services are seamlessly connected to each other. This patient-centric IoT eHealth ecosystem needs a multi-layer architecture: (1) device, (2) fog computing and (3) cloud to empower handling of complex data in terms of its variety, speed, and latency. This fog-driven IoT architecture is followed by various case examples of services and applications that are implemented on those layers. Those examples range from mobile health, assisted living, e-medicine, implants, early warning systems, to population monitoring in smart cities. We then finally address the challenges of IoT eHealth such as data management, scalability, regulations, interoperability, device–network–human interfaces, security, and privacy

An Evaluation Framework for Adaptive Security for the IoT in eHealth

The work presented here has been carried out in the project ASSET – Adaptive Security for Smart Internet of Things in eHealth (2012–2015) funded by the Research Council of Norway in the VERDIKT programme. WThe work presented here has been carried out in the project ASSET – Adaptive Security for Smart Internet of Things in eHealth (2012–2015) funded by the Research Council of Norway in the VERDIKT programme. W—We present an assessment framework to evaluate adaptive security algorithms specifically for the Internet of Things (IoT) in eHealth applications. The successful deployment of the IoT depends on ensuring security and privacy, which need to adapt to the processing capabilities and resource use of the IoT. We develop a framework for the assessment and validation of context-aware adaptive security solutions for the IoT in eHealth that can quantify the characteristics and requirements of a situation. We present the properties to be fulfilled by a scenario to assess and quantify characteristics for the adaptive security solutions for eHealth. We then develop scenarios for patients with chronic diseases using biomedical sensors. These scenarios are used to create storylines for a chronic patient living at home or being treated in the hospital. We show numeric examples for how to apply our framework. We also present guidelines how to integrate our framework to evaluating adaptive security solutionsThe work presented here has been carried out in the project ASSET – Adaptive Security for Smart Internet of Things in eHealth (2012–2015) funded by the Research Council of Norway in the VERDIKT programme

Integrating Internet of Things and EHealth Solutions for Students’ Healthcare

Apple Incorporated’s recent announcement of its entry device – The Apple Watch™ to the wearable’s market can arguably be said to put a final seal of authenticity on wearables. The inevitable ubiquity of wearable devices for eHealth monitoring is a fact soon to be reckoned with. Access to the physiological information provided by the wearables through the ‘6A Connectivity Concept’ of IoT will find positive applications in various fields, most especially in the eHealth and mobile-Health domain. The state of health of a student is key in determining the student’s overall academic performance. Health-related issues usually affect the motivation and ability of students to learn. Therefore it is necessary to provide better health services for students in their various schools and institutions. This paper is a study of the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and eHealth solutions to effectively manage and monitor university students’ health. One of IoT’s main technologies in healthcare is Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. In this study, we show how RFID technology is used to implement an eHealth solution known as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) for managing students’ health information (which includes students’ medical history, prescriptions, laboratory results, Electrocardiography (ECG) results, blood pressure results, and vital signs). This paper also studies wearable devices for monitoring students that are at risk for high blood pressure, which can be due to intense stress, overweight conditions, and family history of high blood pressure

Integrating Internet of Things and EHealth Solutions for Students’ Healthcare

Apple Incorporated’s recent announcement of its entry device – The Apple Watch™ to the wearable’s market can arguably be said to put a final seal of authenticity on wearables. The inevitable ubiquity of wearable devices for eHealth monitoring is a fact soon to be reckoned with. Access to the physiological information provided by the wearables through the ‘6A Connectivity Concept’ of IoT will find positive applications in various fields, most especially in the eHealth and mobile-Health domain. The state of health of a student is key in determining the student’s overall academic performance. Health-related issues usually affect the motivation and ability of students to learn. Therefore it is necessary to provide better health services for students in their various schools and institutions. This paper is a study of the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and eHealth solutions to effectively manage and monitor university students’ health. One of IoT’s main technologies in healthcare is Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. In this study, we show how RFID technology is used to implement an eHealth solution known as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) for managing students’ health information (which includes students’ medical history, prescriptions, laboratory results, Electrocardiography (ECG) results, blood pressure results, and vital signs). This paper also studies wearable devices for monitoring students that are at risk for high blood pressure, which can be due to intense stress, overweight conditions, and family history of high blood pressure

Holistic System Design for Distributed National eHealth Services

publishedVersio

Making the Internet of Things More Reliable Thanks to Dynamic Access Control

While the Internet-of-Things (IoT) infrastructure is rapidly growing, the performance and correctness of such systems becomes more and more critical. Together with flexibility and interoperability, trustworthiness related aspects, including security, privacy, resilience and robustness, are challenging goals faced by the next generation of IoT systems. In this chapter, we propose approaches for IoT tailored access control mechanisms that ensure data and services protection against unauthorized use, with the aim of improving IoT system trustworthiness and lowering the risks of massive-scale IoT-driven cyber-attacks or incidents.acceptedVersio

A patient agent controlled customized blockchain based framework for internet of things

Although Blockchain implementations have emerged as revolutionary technologies for various industrial applications including cryptocurrencies, they have not been widely deployed to store data streaming from sensors to remote servers in architectures known as Internet of Things. New Blockchain for the Internet of Things models promise secure solutions for eHealth, smart cities, and other applications. These models pave the way for continuous monitoring of patient’s physiological signs with wearable sensors to augment traditional medical practice without recourse to storing data with a trusted authority. However, existing Blockchain algorithms cannot accommodate the huge volumes, security, and privacy requirements of health data. In this thesis, our first contribution is an End-to-End secure eHealth architecture that introduces an intelligent Patient Centric Agent. The Patient Centric Agent executing on dedicated hardware manages the storage and access of streams of sensors generated health data, into a customized Blockchain and other less secure repositories. As IoT devices cannot host Blockchain technology due to their limited memory, power, and computational resources, the Patient Centric Agent coordinates and communicates with a private customized Blockchain on behalf of the wearable devices. While the adoption of a Patient Centric Agent offers solutions for addressing continuous monitoring of patients’ health, dealing with storage, data privacy and network security issues, the architecture is vulnerable to Denial of Services(DoS) and single point of failure attacks. To address this issue, we advance a second contribution; a decentralised eHealth system in which the Patient Centric Agent is replicated at three levels: Sensing Layer, NEAR Processing Layer and FAR Processing Layer. The functionalities of the Patient Centric Agent are customized to manage the tasks of the three levels. Simulations confirm protection of the architecture against DoS attacks. Few patients require all their health data to be stored in Blockchain repositories but instead need to select an appropriate storage medium for each chunk of data by matching their personal needs and preferences with features of candidate storage mediums. Motivated by this context, we advance third contribution; a recommendation model for health data storage that can accommodate patient preferences and make storage decisions rapidly, in real-time, even with streamed data. The mapping between health data features and characteristics of each repository is learned using machine learning. The Blockchain’s capacity to make transactions and store records without central oversight enables its application for IoT networks outside health such as underwater IoT networks where the unattended nature of the nodes threatens their security and privacy. However, underwater IoT differs from ground IoT as acoustics signals are the communication media leading to high propagation delays, high error rates exacerbated by turbulent water currents. Our fourth contribution is a customized Blockchain leveraged framework with the model of Patient-Centric Agent renamed as Smart Agent for securely monitoring underwater IoT. Finally, the smart Agent has been investigated in developing an IoT smart home or cities monitoring framework. The key algorithms underpinning to each contribution have been implemented and analysed using simulators.Doctor of Philosoph

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

DevOps for Trustworthy Smart IoT Systems

ENACT is a research project funded by the European Commission under its H2020 program. The project consortium consists of twelve industry and research member organisations spread across the whole EU. The overall goal of the ENACT project was to provide a novel set of solutions to enable DevOps in the realm of trustworthy Smart IoT Systems. Smart IoT Systems (SIS) are complex systems involving not only sensors but also actuators with control loops distributed all across the IoT, Edge and Cloud infrastructure. Since smart IoT systems typically operate in a changing and often unpredictable environment, the ability of these systems to continuously evolve and adapt to their new environment is decisive to ensure and increase their trustworthiness, quality and user experience. DevOps has established itself as a software development life-cycle model that encourages developers to continuously bring new features to the system under operation without sacrificing quality. This book reports on the ENACT work to empower the development and operation as well as the continuous and agile evolution of SIS, which is necessary to adapt the system to changes in its environment, such as newly appearing trustworthiness threats

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper