Balancing Security and Utility in Medical Devices?

ABSTRACT Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are being embedded increasingly often in patients' bodies to monitor and help treat medical conditions. To facilitate monitoring and control, IMDs are often equipped with wireless interfaces. While convenient, wireless connectivity raises the risk of malicious access to an IMD that can potentially infringe patients' privacy and even endanger their lives. Thus, while ease of access to IMDs can be vital for timely medical intervention, too much ease is dangerous. Obvious approaches, such as passwords and certificates, are unworkable at large scale given the lack of central authorities and frequent emergencies in medical settings. Additionally, IMDs are heavily constrained in their power consumption and computational capabilities. Designing access-control mechanisms for IMDs that can meet the many constraints of real-world deployment is an important research challenge. In this paper, we review proposed approaches to the accesscontrol problem for IMDs, including the problem of secure pairing (and key distribution) between an IMD and another device, such as a programmer. (We also treat related technologies, such as bodyarea networks.) We describe some limitations of well-conceived proposals and reveal security weaknesses in two proposed cryptographic pairing schemes. Our intention is to stimulate yet more inventive and rigorous research in the intriguing and challenging areas of IMD security and medical-device security in general

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

Intelligent Sensor Networks

In the last decade, wireless or wired sensor networks have attracted much attention. However, most designs target general sensor network issues including protocol stack (routing, MAC, etc.) and security issues. This book focuses on the close integration of sensing, networking, and smart signal processing via machine learning. Based on their world-class research, the authors present the fundamentals of intelligent sensor networks. They cover sensing and sampling, distributed signal processing, and intelligent signal learning. In addition, they present cutting-edge research results from leading experts

Salt Generation for Hashing Schemes based on ECG readings for Emergency Access to Implantable Medical Devices

Secure communication in medical devices is a pillar in ensuring patient's safety. However, in emergency cases, this can hinder the recovery of the patient. If an emergency team cannot give themselves access to the IMD without the user's assistance, they may be unable to offer any help. This paper introduces a security scheme for similar cases. By creating a backdoor to the IMDs, legal authentication may be performed with the IMD and gain access to it. This work presents a procedure for an emergency team to validate their actions to the IMD without the need of the patient's conscious. This is ensured using hashing function and elliptic curves for the security key generation. The seed that will be used will be the heart rhythm of the patient. The authentication process introduced will only allow access to the identified parties. An eavesdropper will be unable to interfere during emergency cases and can threaten patients' lives. � 2018 IEEE.This publication was made possible by NPRP grant #8-408-2-172 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.Scopu

Digital Transformation in Healthcare

This book presents a collection of papers revealing the impact of advanced computation and instrumentation on healthcare. It highlights the increasing global trend driving innovation for a new era of multifunctional technologies for personalized digital healthcare. Moreover, it highlights that contemporary research on healthcare is performed on a multidisciplinary basis comprising computational engineering, biomedicine, biomedical engineering, electronic engineering, and automation engineering, among other areas

Enhanced Living Environments

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)”. The concept of Enhanced Living Environments (ELE) refers to the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that is more related with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Effective ELE solutions require appropriate ICT algorithms, architectures, platforms, and systems, having in view the advance of science and technology in this area and the development of new and innovative solutions that can provide improvements in the quality of life for people in their homes and can reduce the financial burden on the budgets of the healthcare providers. The aim of this book is to become a state-of-the-art reference, discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on theories, practices, standards, and strategies related to the ELE area. The book contains 12 chapters and can serve as a valuable reference for undergraduate students, post-graduate students, educators, faculty members, researchers, engineers, medical doctors, healthcare organizations, insurance companies, and research strategists working in this area

An inference system framework for personal sensor devices in mobile health and internet of things networks

Future healthcare directions include individuals being monitored in real-time during day-to-day activity using wearable sensors. This thesis solves a critical requirement, that of intelligently managing when body sensors should alert doctors of changes to a person’s health status, bringing existing research closer to live health monitoring

Aerospace Medicine and Biology - A cumulative index to a continuing bibliography

Cumulative index for abstracts of NASA documents on aerospace medicine and biolog

2012-2013, University of Memphis bulletin

University of Memphis bulletin containing the graduate catalog for 2012-2013.https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-ua-pub-bulletins/1432/thumbnail.jp