Body Sensor Networking, Design and Algorithms

13Quality of Service, Security, and Privacy for Wearable Sensor Data

13.1 Introduction

A great deal of clinical data, including radiological images, physiological signals, impression reports by physicians, laboratory reports, and above all patients' identities, are spread around the local and public networks, large core memories, and the cloud. The major concerns in recording, analysis, and disseminating the patient data are quality of service (QoS), network and data security, and, most importantly, protecting patient privacy. The confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, and freshness of patient data are certainly the major body area network (BAN) requirements. The communication systems, techniques, and platforms necessitate having to establish security systems or implement one of the existing data and network security platforms.

Data confidentiality requires that the transmitted information remain strictly private and can only be accessed by authorised persons, for example the doctor who takes care of the patient. It is usually achieved by encrypting the information before sending it using a secret key. Data authenticity is needed to ensure that the information is sent by the right sender for the intended purpose to a recipient through a secure system environment. For this, often a message authentication code is calculated using a shared secret key. Data integrity makes sure that the received data have not been tampered with. However, this can be inspected by verifying the ...