Security in Pervasive Health Care Networks: Current R&D and Future Challenges

Remote health monitoring has tremendous potential to improve quality of health care services in modern and ubiquitous medical environments. It helps to cut the cost in modern healthcare by avoiding unnecessary hospital visits for frequent checkups. In this context, security and protection of sensitive medical data and measurements such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), data integrity and confidentiality and protection of patient’s privacy to be monitored are important aspects in order to increase user’s acceptance of these new technologies. This paper presents an overview of current security threats in pervasive healthcare applications and analyzes the outstanding issues and future challenges.