Privacy Dilemma in Healthcare: A Review on Privacy Preserving Medical Internet of Things

In recent years, the Medical Internet of Things or well known as MIoT has attracted so much attentional from researchers, academia for its potential to alleviate the burden on global healthcare caused by the shortage of medical staff, chronic diseases, and deadly contagious diseases which quickly turned into global pandemics like recent COVID-19. It is believed that soon, MIoT will become the next healthcare enabler contributing to all major aspects of healthcare. Day by day the number of MIoT devices in healthcare growing with a rapid phase and this also will lead to a massive increase of data that the devices are generating. This large volume of data and the devices themselves are posing huge questions about the security and the privacy of the entire MIoT ecosystem. As of now, the cyber-attacks that target healthcare are also increasing with a rapid phase, where comprehensive cyber-attacks that exploit the privacy of MIoT data and devices may even lead to jeopardizing the security of the entire ecosystem and may cause loss of patient lives if no countermeasures are taken. Hence the privacy of MIoT in healthcare is becoming a major threat where no adequate research has not been done so far. With this regard, in this study, we aim to review the privacy aspect of this MIoT and privacy-preserving solutions for MIoT along with the challenges pertaining to the discipline with the anticipated future directions.