Survey of main challenges (security and privacy) in wireless body area networks for healthcare applications

TLDR

Wireless Body Area Networks enable remote monitoring of patient health via wearable sensors, but secure and private data handling is essential to protect records from intrusion. This paper reviews WBAN communication architecture, security and privacy requirements, threats, challenges, current measures, and identifies open research areas. The authors conducted a literature review of WBAN standards and publications to analyze architecture, requirements, threats, and challenges.

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a new trend in the technology that provides remote mechanism to monitor and collect patient's health record data using wearable sensors. It is widely recognized that a high level of system security and privacy play a key role in protecting these data when being used by the healthcare professionals and during storage to ensure that patient's records are kept safe from intruder's danger. It is therefore of great interest to discuss security and privacy issues in WBANs. In this paper, we reviewed WBAN communication architecture, security and privacy requirements and security threats and the primary challenges in WBANs to these systems based on the latest standards and publications. This paper also covers the state-of-art security measures and research in WBAN. Finally, open areas for future research and enhancements are explored.