Improving e-health security through trust negotiation

To achieve higher levels of efficiency and to improve the quality of care, remote monitoring systems for elderly offer interesting solutions. The data collected by the monitoring system are transmitted to the healthcare provider and stored on the healthcare provider's server in the form of patients' Electronic Health Records (EHR). It is important to secure the transmission of the patient's EHR between the healthcare provider server and the mobile device being used by the healthcare professional, as their communication is normally via unsecure networks, such as the Internet. The approaches proposed in this study ensure that patients' EHRs are only disclosed to the authorized healthcare professionals, on the registered devices and at the appropriate locations. To achieve these security requirements, building on the strengths of Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, a trust negotiation approach is proposed. For verification purposes, a mobile application is also constructed. The experimental works confirm that by applying the proposed approach, significant improvements in the security of the remote health monitoring systems can be achieved.