IoT Sensor Initiated Healthcare Data Security

While the Internet of Things (IoT) has been instrumental in healthcare data transmission, it also presents vulnerabilities and security risks to patients’ personalized health information for remote medical treatment. Currently most published security solutions available for healthcare data are not focused on data flow all the way from IoT sensor devices placed on a patient’s body through network routers to doctor’s offices. In this paper, we studied how the IoT network facilitates healthcare data transmission for remote medical treatment, explored security risks associated with unsecured data transmission, especially between IoT sensor devices and network routers, and then proposed an encrypted security solution initiated at IoT sensor devices. Our proposed solution provides a cryptography algorithm embedded into the sensor device such that the packets generated with patient’s health data are encrypted right at the sensor device before being transmitted. The proof of concept has been verified using a lab setup with two level encryption at the IoT sensor level and two level decryption at the receiving end at the doctor’s office. Test results are promising for an end-to-end security solution of healthcare data transmission in IoT. This paper also opens up further research avenues on IoT sensor driven security.