A privacy risk assessment for the Internet of Things in healthcare

Beyond the massive technological opportunities and benefits the IoT offers, important challenges such as trust, security, and privacy should be considered [8]. In the IoT, things, such as sensor devices, will be integrated into streets, homes, work and recreation places, buildings, shopping centres, cars, and other public environments. They will also be carried by people or mounted on mobile vehicles. As a result, things may communicate with each other locally within personal area network (PAN) setups or in a peer-to-peer fashion. They may also interact with IoT applications remotely over the Internet. In a typical IoT application, IoT devices may have the capabilities of automatically sensing, communicating, and processing the information collected from their environments and their users [14], with a high degree of spatial and temporal precision. This information may comprise the exchange of users' personal and contextual information, including their sensitive or personal information. Therefore, it is likely that new privacy issues will arise with such a deep penetration of technology in our life [13]. This paper attempts to highlight the privacy issues derived from the adoption of the Internet of Things technologies in healthcare. Section 2 discusses the various IoT developments in healthcare, such as remote health monitoring systems and assistive technologies. The associated and derived privacy issues and challenges are then discussed in Sect. 3. This section ends with a brief privacy risk assessment. Concluding remarks are provided in Sect. 4.