Preserving Privacy in Emergency Response Based on Wireless Body Sensor Networks

E-healthcare is becoming a vital part of our living environment and exhibits advantages over paper-based legacy systems. Wireless body sensor networks are indispensable in one application of e-healthcare, the remote monitoring or remote care services. However, privacy is the foremost concern of the patients and the biggest impediment of the deployment of e-healthcare systems. In addressing privacy issues, conflicts from the functional requirements must be taken into account. One such requirement is the efficient and effective response to medical emergencies. In this paper, we propose to solve these conflicting goals based on suitable cryptographic schemes. In addition, security enhancements are proposed which satisfy other fundamental security goals besides the privacy requirements.