Securing medical data in smart homes

Technological progress in the medical field has led to the design of a set of software and hardware tools that enable real-time monitoring of the patients. To reduce the rising cost of hospitalization, researchers are building Smart Hospital Environments, which are designed to connect the patient's home to a virtual clinic continuously monitored by health experts. Some of the major concerns that still need to be addressed before these devices get a wide acceptance include protecting the security and privacy of medical data collected by these devices. Traditional static access control solutions do not address the complex dynamic security requirements of healthcare applications. This paper presents a context-based access control architecture to fulfill the security requirements of protecting medical data in pervasive healthcare. The access control rules are updated based on the collected data that describes the current state of the patient.