The ongoing increase in the world’s population, globally and in Qatar, has spawned a revolution in the area of healthcare, in general, and eHealth, in particular. Indeed, it has become challenging for the traditional healthcare model to cope with the increase in the number of patients as well as the recent technology revolution, thus mandating a shift in mindset within the healthcare sector. In the era of the “Internet of Things” (IoT), interconnected digital devices can now enable the collection and exchange of huge amounts of information, thus creating interesting opportunities in different sectors, including agriculture, energy, transportation, education, and more importantly, healthcare. Thus, it has become essential to benefit from these opportunities allowed by technological advancements in order to transform and modernize the healthcare sector. In this context, remote patient monitoring through the use of wearable sensors presents an efficient low cost solution helping in preventive care and continuing care, while leading to a reduced number of doctor visits which, in turn, reduces overcrowding in hospital emergency services.
However, these technological advances also open the door to new threats that can stem from a broad range of sources, from attackers with malicious intent to opportunists exploiting vulnerabilities in systems to cause deliberate or accidental harm. The cyber threat landscape has indeed evolved from individual hackers to highly organized groups and advanced cyber-criminal syndicates, with healthcare being a major target. Moreover, the very nature of IoT eHealth/mHealth devices – small with limited capabilities – renders them a prime target for cyber-attacks that can compromise the highly sensitive nature of the data carried by those, otherwise simple devices. Consequently, to ensure a successful deployment of eHealth/mHealth systems, and to increase the acceptability of citizens for remote patient monitoring, appropriate security measures should be put in place to protect the security and confidentiality of patient data.
Thus, the goal of this project is to holistically investigate the security of eHealth/mHealth systems, focusing on the protection of patient information while being transmitted over wireless channels, from the wearable sensors to the local controller at home, from the controller to the destination servers of the healthcare systems (through the cellular network), as well as from the healthcare system to emergency response teams on the move heading towards a patient’s location in case of detecting an emergency. The proposed solutions will be tailored to cater for the limitations of the IoT devices, in terms of power consumption and processing power, as well as their reliance on backscatter transmission, while ensuring a high-speed delivery of the patient data over the wireless medium. Indeed, the proposed solutions will strike a desirable tradeoff between the security and usability of healthcare IoT devices.