An approach to enhance the security of remote health monitoring systems

Remote health monitoring systems help in improving the quality of care and offer a solution for people who require monitoring from home. These systems collect relevant data and transmit them to the healthcare provider, to be stored on their servers in the form of patients' Electronic Health Records (EHRs). With such a system, healthcare professionals can remotely access each patient's EHR on their mobile devices, for instance, when they are at the patients' homes. They may need to access patients' EHR for obtaining the history of the patient's medical records or modifying the patient's EHR. Among the main concerns in acceptance of these systems, the privacy of personally sensitive information and securing EHRs during the transmission must be addressed. It is specifically important to secure the transmission of the patient's EHR between the healthcare provider server and the mobile device being used by the healthcare professional, as their communication is normally via unsecure networks, such as the Internet. In this paper, a trust negotiation approach is proposed to address these security concerns. Trust negotiation is combined with the Transport Layer Security (TLS) as the underlying protocol. This combination of technology aims at maximizing the security of the remote monitoring system. It results in significant improvements in security compared to the traditional identity-based only access control techniques. The proposed approach is implemented as a mobile application. It demonstrates that the developed application is easy to use and deploy in typical mobile environments.