Context-Aware Privacy Protection for Wireless Sensor Networks in Hybrid Hierarchical Architecture

Sensor networks (SNs) placed on human bodies and in the environment can intelligently and unobtrusively support professional teams (for example health care professionals) to improve their work and on the other hand their subjects (for example patients and elderly at hospital or at home). In pervasive healthcare settings, protecting the privacy of the medical care subjects and the medical staff is very important, because the lack of privacy may hinder the broad acceptance of pervasive health technology. Moreover, there is a need of empowering end-users with flexible personalized controls for their personal data collected, processed and communicated via SNs. The privacy protecting mechanisms must be non-obtrusive and context-aware to support the daily private and professional life of the persons. Since the devices/nodes used by patients and medical professionals will have diverse capabilities, many of them with very limited resources, an important question is the implication of the privacy protection mechanisms on the overall system performance. This paper proposes novel flexible privacy protection framework suitable for diverse set of ubiquitous applications; describes evaluation frames for it and investigates the cost of privacy protection. Evaluation of the influence of the context complexity and policy-based management is also presented.