SMS: A Secure Healthcare Model for Smart Cities

TLDR

IoT has enabled smart cities with interconnected healthcare services, but the growing use of connected devices raises privacy and security concerns for patient data. The paper proposes a privacy‑preserved Smart Medical System (SMS) framework for smart cities, outlining how to capture and store medical big data from IoT devices. SMS uses secured Mobile Edge Computing for real‑time edge analytics and blockchain to ensure tamper‑proof protection of patient data.

Abstract

Technological innovations have enabled the realization of a utopian world where all objects of everyday life, as well as humans, are interconnected to form an “Internet of Things (IoT).”" These connected technologies and IoT solutions have led to the emergence of smart cities where all components are converted into a connected smart ecosystem. IoT has envisioned several areas of smart cities including the modern healthcare environment like real-time monitoring, patient information management, ambient-assisted living, ambient-intelligence, anomaly detection, and accelerated sensing. IoT has also brought a breakthrough in the medical domain by integrating stake holders, medical components, and hospitals to bring about holistic healthcare management. The healthcare domain is already witnessing promising IoT-based solutions ranging from embedded mobile applications to wearable devices and implantable gadgets. However, with all these exemplary benefits, there is a need to ensure the safety and privacy of the patient’s personal and medical data communicated to and from the connected devices and systems. For a smart city, it is pertinent to have an accessible, effective, and secure healthcare system for its inhabitants. This paper discusses the various elements of technology-enabled healthcare and presents a privacy-preserved and secure “Smart Medical System (SMS)” framework for the smart city ecosystem. For providing real-time analysis and responses, this paper proposes to use the concept of secured Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) for performing critical time-bound computations on the edge itself. In order to protect the medical and personal data of the patients and to make the data tamper-proof, the concept of blockchain has been used. Finally, this paper highlights the ways to capture and store the medical big data generated from IoT devices and sensors.