A secure medical information management system for wireless body area networks

Abstract

The wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of wearable computing devices and can support various healthcare-related applications. There exist two crucial issues when WBANs are utilized for healthcare applications. One is the protection of the sensitive biometric data transmitted over the insecure wireless channels. The other is the design of effective medical management mechanisms. In this paper, a secure medical information management system is proposed and implemented on a TinyOS-based WBAN test bed to simultaneously address these two issues. In this system, the electronic medical record (EMR) is bound to the biometric data with a novel fragile zero-watermarking scheme based on the modified visual secret sharing (MVSS). In this manner, the EMR can be utilized not only for medical management but also for data integrity checking. Additionally, both the biometric data and the EMR are encrypted, and the EMR is further protected by the MVSS. Our analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system not only protects the confidentialities of both the biometric data and the EMR but also offers reliable patient information authentication, explicit healthcare operation verification and undeniable doctor liability identification for WBANs.