Trust-Based Decision Making for Health IoT Systems

With the onset of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, the number of IoT devices and sensors is increasing tremendously. This paper is concerned with a health IoT system consisting of various IoT devices carried by members of an environmental health community. We propose a novel trust-based decision making protocol that uses trust-based information sharing among the health IoT devices, so that a collective knowledge base can be built to rate the environment at a particular location and time. This knowledge would enable an IoT device acting on behalf of its user to decide whether or not it should visit this place/environment for health reasons. Unlike existing trust management protocols, our trust-based health IoT protocol considers risk classification, reliability trust, and loss of health probability as three design dimensions for decision making, resulting in a protocol suitable for decision making in health IoT systems. Our protocol is resilient to noisy sensing data provided by IoT devices either unintentionally or intentionally. We present performance data of our trust-based health IoT protocol and conduct a comparative performance analysis of our protocol with two baseline protocols to demonstrate the feasibility.