A Privacy Safeguard Framework for a WebRTC/WoT-Based Healthcare Architecture

In this paper, an e-health architecture offering secure remote medical services using WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) enhanced with contextual health information coming from medical connected sensors, is proposed and analyzed. The goal is to allow patients (injured, elderly, disabled, etc.) to benefit from a medical assistance just by calling a remote medical support (doctors, nurses, etc.) using a real-time communication technology such as WebRTC. Moreover, the advancement of the medical devices, on one side, and the emergence of the Web of Things (WoT), on the other side, makes this approach possible. Hence, granting the users the ability of monitoring their own health status and an awareness of their health condition. However, in such architectures, in order for the users to access these services, they need to provide and exchange personal data, and in particular the health related ones. Therefore, user's private information may be exposed to privacy violation and disclosure. Understanding the privacy holes regarding the protection of the personal health related data, identifying the privacy leakage points and studying the privacy requirements are important in order to propose a privacy safeguard for the proposed healthcare architecture, which is the aim of this paper. Additionally, a risk analysis, the sources of these risks and the possible countermeasures are also conducted during this process.