Enabling Location Privacy and Medical Data Encryption in Patient Telemonitoring Systems

Abstract

Patient telemonitoring systems (PTS) deal with the acquisition, processing, and secure transmission of a patient's physiological and physical parameters to a remote location, where expert medical knowledge is available. In emergency situations, when the patient's life is threatened, the trend in modern PTS is to transmit the current location of the patient. Although research in communications security has led to mechanisms that sufficiently protect medical data, research related to location privacy area is still in its early stages. This paper proposes an architecture that enhances PTS through location privacy and data encryption. We study the most popular PTS technologies in conjunction with location privacy architectures and propose an innovative scheme that exploits a point-to-point protocol called Mist. We describe a prototype implementation, developed for validating the proposed framework along with the corresponding evaluation results.