A trustworthy beacon-based location tracking model for body area sensor networks in m-health

Recent advances in ultra lightweight communications and sensor devices have ushered in a new range of applications to incorporate location awareness into mission critical situations such as remote health monitoring of chronically ill patients or emergency response personnel. However, in an open environment where these devices could potentially operate in the future, reliable and accurate positioning may depend on not just the robustness of the hardware or the software system, but also their resistance to various malicious tempering. This paper takes a cross-disciplinary view to apply the knowledge from studying the phenomenon of trust and reputation among humans to improve the reliability of beacon based positioning for body area sensor networks. We propose a novel uncertainty based trust model to improve the effectiveness of an evidence-based trust model against collusion and discuss the preliminary findings from our early stage empirical studies.