Enabling secure service discovery in mobile healthcare enterprise networks

Advances in wireless networks, sensors, and portable devices offer unique chances to deliver novel anytime anywhere medical services and information, thus enabling a wide range of healthcare applications, from mobile telemedicine to remote patient monitoring, from location-based medical services to emergency response. Mobile e-health has great potential to extend enterprise hospital services beyond traditional boundaries, but faces many organizational and technological challenges. In pervasive healthcare environments, characterized by user/service mobility, device heterogeneity, and wide deployment scale, a crucial issue is to discover available healthcare services taking into account the dynamic operational and environmental context of patient-healthcare operator interactions. In particular, novel discovery solutions should support interoperability in healthcare service descriptions and ensure security during the discovery process by making services discoverable by authorized users only. This article proposes a semantic-based secure discovery framework for mobile healthcare enterprise networks that exploits semantic metadata (profiles and policies) to allow flexible and secure service search/retrieval. As a key feature, our approach integrates access control functionalities within the discovery framework to provide users with filtered views on available services based on service access requirements and user security credentials.