SecourHealth: A Delay-Tolerant Security Framework for Mobile Health Data Collection

• Published in: IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics Vol. 19; no. 2; pp. 761 - 772
• Main Authors: Simplicio, Marcos A., Iwaya, Leonardo H., Barros, Bruno M., Carvalho, Tereza C. M. B., Naslund, Mats
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.03.2015
• Subjects: Authentication; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Computer Security; Data collection; Datavetenskap; Electronic Health Records; Humans; Informatics; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Remote Sensing Technology - methods; Servers; Software; Telemedicine - methods; remote data collection; Mobile health (mHealth); security
• ISSN: 2168-2194; 2168-2208; 2168-2208
• DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2014.2320444

Security is one of the most imperative requirements for the success of systems that deal with highly sensitive data, such as medical information. However, many existing mobile health solutions focused on collecting patients' data at their homes that do not include security among their main requirements. Aiming to tackle this issue, this paper presents SecourHealth, a lightweight security framework focused on highly sensitive data collection applications. SecourHealth provides many security services for both stored and in-transit data, displaying interesting features such as tolerance to lack of connectivity (a common issue when promoting health in remote locations) and the ability to protect data even if the device is lost/stolen or shared by different data collection agents. Together with the system's description and analysis, we also show how SecourHealth can be integrated into a real data collection solution currently deployed in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil.