Integration of wireless sensor network with medical service provider for ubiquitous e-Healthcare

Developments in ICT have enabled remote connectivity of patients, doctors, and hospitals; hence medical services are no longer confined to hospitals and clinics. The increased mobility in everyday life demands anywhere, anytime, i.e., ubiquitous availability of healthcare services over the internet. The wireless sensor networks are integrated in healthcare solutions effortlessly enabling remote access. The weak / geriatric patients can feed their biological measurements by periodic or aperiodic uploading without visiting any clinic or healthcare center. In case of In-body or On-body sensors a suitable way of clinical measurements can be setup which may be automatic or semi automatic. In case of disasters the physical networks may be knocked out leaving thousands of victims helpless. The wireless sensor networks can be quickly setup by adhoc networking to reach such patients. There can be a mix of wireless sensor networks at the patient end using Bluetooth or adhoc network protocol followed by WPAN and WiMAX connectivity leading to fixed networks. Research is being done to address the bandwidth and security issues with minimal battery power and computation requirements while meeting the acceptable security standards. The proposed hierarchical security management scheme uses biometric data, e-Health card or RFID tag for patient or doctor authentication to access healthcare services. The healthcare server issues a session key for one time usage. The upper layers use IPSEC along with the symmetric session key for data transport. In cases of disaster, temporary arrangement can be made by passing the requirement to access the health care server to be confirmed at a suitable time later. The security at the lowest level can be further strengthened by including the concept of root level trust embedded in the sensors which are registered with a Trusted Coordinator.