Role of D2D Communications in Mobile Health Applications: Security Threats and Requirements

Monitoring physiological signals in real time has become popular among patients in recent years. Mobile health applications provide a platform to connect sensors with smartphones and transmit the sensors' readings to web platforms designed for practitioners and patients. Due to the life‐critical nature of health data, it becomes imperative to establish an extremely reliable and 24/7 available connection to web platforms. In this regard, device‐to‐device (D2D) communication has the ability to establish communication links in different indoor and outdoor scenarios, including when the patient's phone is out of the coverage of any mobile network or has partial coverage. D2D is an emerging paradigm that enables different mobile health applications for varying use cases and scenarios. This chapter highlights the security challenges related to D2D communication in the field of mobile healthcare platforms. In particular, the focus is to identify different phases of D2D communication and to highlight the security requirements and threats associated within each phase. In the end, we identify various solutions to different security threats.