A secure patient monitoring solution using wireless sensor networks

The Wireless sensor networks (WSN) is developing over time in terms of technologies, protocols and security. Each of these have different requirements, challenges, and solutions, which may or may not be similar for the different applications of this field like medical, civil/structural, marine, agriculture, and military. Regarding the medical application, a complete study of the security measures required for WSN systems is discussed with a flavour of technologies and protocols used in the system. The inclusion of security is an important phase for wireless networks especially in medical domain due to the involvement of patient privacy. The study works towards the creation of an end-to-end secure WSN solution that collects patient data via sensor nodes at one end and transports it to the other end i.e. a hospital/doctor’s PC. This communication encompasses tough security measures. These measures are applied to each component/process of the presented system: patient data, sensor nodes, routing phase, and internet connection. The security measures applied to these phases collectively achieve confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication, DoS resistance, and strong key management features. Each of these are studied extensively, and are implemented on simulator and/or hardware platforms. The implementation presented in this work gives rise to the following results: 96.5% detection and 83% correction rate for secure routing; 21.49mJ and 0.049mJ energy consumption for Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) and Hash message authentication code based Key Derivation Function (HKDF) Key generation; and n unique Cluster Heads for n number of sensor nodes in the cluster phase of the presented system. These results are an improvement compared to the respective related work provided for each phase. Finally, the study and its results increase confidence in using the presented system in hospitals and clinics for the benefit of the patients and the hospital staff.