Abstract

With the pervasiveness of smart phones and the advance of wireless body sensor networks (BSNs), mobile Healthcare (m-Healthcare), which extends the operation of Healthcare provider into a pervasive environment for better health monitoring, has attracted considerable interest recently. However, the flourish of m-Healthcare still faces many challenges including information security and privacy preservation. In this paper, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving opportunistic computing framework, called SPOC, for m-Healthcare emergency. With SPOC, smart phone resources including computing power and energy can be opportunistically gathered to process the computing-intensive personal health information (PHI) during m-Healthcare emergency with minimal privacy disclosure. In specific, to leverage the PHI privacy disclosure and the high reliability of PHI process and transmission in m-Healthcare emergency, we introduce an efficient user-centric privacy access control in SPOC framework, which is based on an attribute-based access control and a new privacy-preserving scalar product computation (PPSPC) technique, and allows a medical user to decide who can participate in the opportunistic computing to assist in processing his overwhelming PHI data. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed SPOC framework can efficiently achieve user-centric privacy access control in m-Healthcare emergency. In addition, performance evaluations via extensive simulations demonstrate the SPOC’s effectiveness in term of providing high reliable PHI process and transmission while minimizing the privacy disclosure during m-Healthcare emergency.

With the penetration of smartphones and the advance of wireless sensor networks (BSNs), mobile healthcare (m-Healthcare), which extends the operation of the healthcare provider in a ubiquitous environment to improve monitoring of health. However, the flowering of m-Healthcare still faces many challenges including information security and privacy preservation. In this article, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving opportunistic computing framework, called SPOC, for m-Healthcare emergency. With SPOC, smartphone resources, including computing power and power, can be collected opportunistically to process computer-intensive health information (PHI) during the m-Healthcare emergency with minimal disclosure of privacy. Specifically, in order to take advantage of the disclosure of PHI privacy and the high reliability of the PHI process and m-Healthcare emergency transmission, we introduced an efficient user-centred privacy access control in the SPOC framework, based on Attribute-based access control, and a New Privacy Preservation Scalability (PPSPC) technique and allows a medical user to decide who can participate in opportunistic computing to assist in processing their overwhelming PHI data. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed SPOC framework can efficiently achieve user-centred privacy access control in the m-Healthcare emergency. In addition, performance evaluations through extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the SPOC in terms of providing a high-reliability PHI process and transmission, while minimising privacy disclosure during the m-Healthcare emergency.

Although the m-Healthcare system can benefit medical users through health monitoring, the flourishing of the m-Healthcare system still depends on how we understand and manage the challenges we face in the m-Healthcare system, especially During a medical emergency. To clearly illustrate the challenges in the m-Healthcare emergency, we consider the following scenario. In general, medical information from a medical user should be reported to the health centre every 5 minutes for normal remote monitoring [6]. However, when he has an emergency medical condition, for example, a heart attack, his BSN becomes busy reading a variety of medical measures, such as heart rate, blood pressure and as a result, a lot of PHI data will be generated in a very short period of time, and in addition they must be reported every 10 seconds for intensive monitoring before the arrival of the ambulance and medical personnel. However, since the smartphone is not only used for monitoring health care, but also for other applications, ie calling with friends, the smartphone's power might be insufficient when an emergency occurs. Although this type of unexpected event can occur with a very low probability, ie 0.005, for a medical emergency, when we take in 10,000 emergency cases under consideration, the average number of the event will reach 50, which is not negligible and indicates Explicitly the reliability of MHealthcare system remains a challenge in case of emergency.

Although the m-Healthcare system can benefit medical users through health monitoring, the flourishing of the m-Healthcare system still depends on how we understand and manage the challenges we face in the m-Healthcare system, especially During a medical emergency. To clearly illustrate the challenges in the m-Healthcare emergency, we consider the following scenario. In general, medical information from a medical user should be reported to the health centre every 5 minutes for normal remote monitoring . However, when he has an emergency medical condition, for example, a heart attack, his BSN becomes busy reading a variety of medical measures, such as heart rate, blood pressure and as a result, a lot of PHI data will be generated in a very short period of time, and in addition they must be reported every 10 seconds for intensive monitoring before the arrival of the ambulance and medical personnel. However, since the smartphone is not only used for monitoring health care, but also for other applications, ie calling with friends, the smartphone's power might be insufficient when an emergency occurs.