A study on data confidentiality in early detection of Alzheimer's disease

The rapidly aging population causes long hospital waiting time, expensive hospital stays and increases the workload of doctors and medical practitioners. Managing the cost and quality of treatment and caring for seniors are important in all countries. This phenomenon has a demand for electronic healthcare (e-healthcare). A Bluetooth enabled in-home patient monitoring system facilitates early detection of Alzheimer's disease. With the help of short-range Bluetooth communications, the location and movement pattern of a patient can be tracked and recorded in a local database. Thus a medical practitioner is able to perform remote diagnosis via the internet. This system is not suitable for long-range outdoor environments. The e-healthcare solution has a number of issues like security and privacy that are hard to accomplish in an effective way. The proposed e-healthcare solution can be enhanced for long range outdoor environments with location tracking technology like GPS (Global Positioning System). Data security issues can be considered with two important aspects like secure and dependable distributed data storage and fine-grained distributed data access control for sensitive and private patient medical data. Different methods are analyzed to improve the security and efficiency of data sharing. This work facilitates better medical treatments, improve the quality of treatments and reduce healthcare costs.