Enabling Security for Healthcare Monitoring Environment Using Pervasive Computing
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:, contact: 9944381255
------
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
- 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 peopleare willing to spend a significant part of their income, the amount of money that can bespend on new treatment methods, the benefit of which is mostly marginal, is certainlylimited.
Fig.1 wearable medical device
- 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 ad-hoc 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.
- 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 micro-payment 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 ofthe 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 otherprocesses within a hospital. Decisions are often based upon information about the physicallocation 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 thescene.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 particularphysician 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.
- ECC VERSUS CONVENTIONAL CRYPTOSYSTEMS
ECC is emerging as an attractive public-key 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 AND FUTURE WORK
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.
REFERENCES
[1] UpkarVarshney, ―Pervasive Healthcare and Wireless Health Monitoring Mobile NetwApplspringer (2007) .J. U. Duncombe, ―Infrared navigation—Part I: An assessment of feasibility,‖IEEE Trans. Electron Devices, vol. ED-11, pp. 34-39, Jan. 1959.
[2] Wells PNT ―Can technology truly reduce healthcare costs‖, IEEE Eng Med BiolMag 20–25, January–February2003.
[3] G. Senthil Kumar, 2K. Tamilarasi,‖ A Trust Based Security System for Mobile Health Care‖ proceedings of the Int. Conf. on Information Science and Applications ICISA , Chennai, India, February 2010.
[4] Krishna Venkatasubramanian and Sandeep K.S. Gupta,‖ Security Solutions for Pervasive Healthcare‖ AU7921 C015 December 8, 2006.
[5] K. Van Laerhoven ,‖ Medical Healthcare Monitoring with Wearable and Implantable Sensors‖, The 3rd International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing for Pervasive Healthcare Applications, Nottingham, U.K., 2004.
[6] VivekKatiyar, KamleshDutta, Syona Gupta,‖ A Survey on Elliptic Curve Cryptography for pervasive Computing Environment, International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 11– No.10, December 2010
[7] PradeepKannadiga & Mohammad Zulkernine, Sheikh I. Ahamed,‖ Towards an Intrusion Detection System for Pervasive Computing Environments‖ Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC’05)0-7695-2315-3/05, IEEE.
[8] Y. Zhang, W. Lee, and Y. Huang, ―Intrusion Detection Techniques for Mobile Wireless Networks‖, ACM WirelessNetworks Journal, 9(5): 545-556, September 2003.