Towards secure e-health interoperable personal networks

Abstract

The ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards recently announced was established to ensure plug-and-play interoperability between medical devices within personal area networks. The new standards transfer the responsibility for implementing security solutions for the mobile health systems to the manufacturer. The paper proposes an enhancement of the current specification of ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 standard with a patient authentication and identity management procedure which functions on the basis of biometric technology. The proposed identification procedure works with biometric keys derived from fingerprint measurements. The use of biometrics gives patients greater confidence in the identity management system, and fosters the trust in using mobile medical devices on a larger scale. The test system, implemented using the Continua Health Alliance framework, proved that the proposed identity management solution is easily embeddable into the ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.