An integrated & secure system for wearable devices

Abstract

Health services are under increasing pressure to reduce large waiting times for appointments. The delayed diagnosis of a human illnesses could have profound consequences for the patient. The large waiting times may be attributed to lack of data, the accuracy of the data or the timeliness of the availability of the data. In addition to this people often priorities their busy lives over their health. Other factors that affect delayed diagnosis of patients could be attributed to ill-health and the difficulty in the patient visiting the health-care practitioner, this is more evident in elderly patients that may have suffered a deterioration of their health. To overcome these obstacles eHealth systems could be put in place to facilitate the transmission of real-time and accurate data regarding a patient's health directly to secure database that can be accessed by authorized practitioners. This paper outlines the use of eHealth (electronic health) to improve health care services which makes use of a wearable set of secure sensors and a secure database that is accessible using a web application. The proposed wearable system records and stores encrypted data which is related to the body's physical parameters. Then, the encrypted data are transmitted using wireless technologies from the wearable device to a secure relational multi-user database using a protected protocol. The data can be accessed by the patient and professionals, such as general practitioners, using a web interface once authentication has taken place. This secure wearable architecture alleviates the problems of the lack of data, the inaccuracy of data and the timeliness of data by recording vital body parameters throughout the day and by sending real-time live data to a system that can be immediately accessed by the practitioner. The system also allows for the automatic analysis of data and presentation of the data using graphs which could aid the practitioner in determining patterns in the patients' health statistics.