Wireless security for personalised and mobile healthcare services

m-health is a new and evolving research discipline that is defined as emerging merging mobile communications and network technologies for healthcare. This new evolutionary research area will involve the provision of new paradigms in healthcare that will provide both the health care professionals and patients with an efficient, secure, ubiquitous and robust infrastructure coupled with tools for the assessment and management of patient health status and the support of preventive and patient empowerment programmes. However, for such new services to be provided, in which patient confidential data will be routinely transferred between mobile devices having no prior knowledge of each other, robust new security services will be essential. These will have to be based on new security paradigms that, unlike today, cannot assume the presence of common trusted third parties, or require the patients to use cumbersome key or password management techniques. The assessment and the trustworthiness of "stranger" devices such as future wireless wearables and implantable devices will need to replace me former or some of the existing security methodologies. Issues such as context awareness and mobile ubiquitous computing systems will be the driving force for such development in existing security architectures and technologies that will be compatible with the requirement of such systems and services and the whole m-health security infrastructure will need to be autonomic and predictive with self annealing so that it can determine when it is being attacked or not.