Enabling Secure Mobile Access for Electronic Health Care Applications

Abstract

Medical applications have already been integrated into mobile devices (e.g. Tablet PCs, PDAs and smart phones) and are being used by medical personnel in treatment centers, for retrieving and examining patient's Electronic Health Records (EHR). In such mobile healthcare applications, specific attention is drawn towards the security requirements since the transmission of sensitive medical data through a public network renders the problem of communication privacy. In this paper we present an approach to transfer the medical records of an individual by using the existing infrastructure of mobile operators. To achieve that, we propose the application of existing technologies in 3G networks such as the generic bootstrapping architecture (GBA) to enable the secure transfer of EHR data. The paper presents the corresponding applicability scenarios, initial results from a prototype test bed and discusses the feasibility of the proposed solution along with its limitations