Secure Management of Medical Data in Wireless Environments

Wireless devices are responsible for a new era in computing. New networking paradigms such as mobile computing, ad-hoc networks pervasive infrastructures, all offer new possibilities to the user, from experimental technologies lately some of the aforementioned examples tend to become part of ordinary life applications. The medical sector benefits substantially from the use of mobile devices, since monitoring becomes more efficient and flexible for both the patient as well as for the practitioner. This means that data may be accessible from anywhere, enabling ubiquitous access to information. There are though certain requirements mainly associated with the strict security framework that rules the processing and transmission of medical data. The sensitive nature of medical information forces the implementation of medical wireless systems to be compliant with a number of security related requirements and also to be able to interact with other similar systems (interoperability) as well as to deal with bandwidth and hardware resource constraints that characterize the wireless topology. In this paper we present an architecture that attempts to deal with these issues, moreover, in order to prove the validity of our approach we have also evaluated the performance of our platform through simulation in different operating scenarios.