Security and privacy issues in health monitoring systems: Ecare@home case study

Abstract

Automated systems for monitoring elderly people in their home are becoming more and more common. Indeed, an increasing number of home sensor networks for healthcare can be found in the recent literature, indicating a clear research direction in smart homes for healthcare. Although the huge amount of sensitive data these systems deal with and expose to the external world, security and privacy issues are surprisingly not taken into consideration. The aim of this paper is to raise some key security and privacy issues that home health monitor systems should face with. The analysis is based on a real world monitoring sensor network for healthcare built in the context of the eCare@Home project.