Overview of secure eHealth systems for patients with IMDs.
Abstract:
Implantable medical devices, such as pacemakers, cardiac defibrillators, and insulin pumps, play a crucial role in monitoring patients’ vital signs within healthcare syst...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Implantable medical devices, such as pacemakers, cardiac defibrillators, and insulin pumps, play a crucial role in monitoring patients’ vital signs within healthcare systems. However, these networked devices are susceptible to external attacks and breaches of trust, hindering the potential innovation and social benefits of eHealth services. To address these concerns, we propose a novel ECG-based key generation scheme and blockchain-based authentication protocol to build a trustworthy healthcare service under any situation. The key will be extracted in a single heartbeat using fiducial features. Compared with the existing works, the proposed key generation achieves the most efficient and secure method by introducing newly designed techniques to identify the unique features based on the time differences within a small window of the ECG signals. In our key generation process, we utilized three distinct fiducial features: amplitude peak differences, time differences between peaks, and slope between each pair of peaks. After obtaining the distinct fiducial features, each set of features denoted as {F} undergoes an encoding process, resulting in 16-bit vectors. To ensure randomness, the most significant bits of the encoded vectors are discarded due to their low entropy and least significant bits, which offer a greater degree of variability has been used. To validate our key generation method, we conducted the NIST statistical suite test. Our key generation process successfully passed all the necessary criteria and requirements set by the NIST suite test for ensuring the security and reliability of cryptographic systems. The proposed authentication protocol for the interaction between a patient and a doctor consists of three parts, addressing different scenarios that may arise including a patient visits a new doctor and emergencies which may be necessary for emergency medical services (EMS) personnel to immediately access the IMD. Experimental results demonstrate the e...
Overview of secure eHealth systems for patients with IMDs.
Published in: IEEE Access ( Volume: 11)