The explosion of healthcare costs over the last decade has prompted the ICT industry to respond with solutions for reducing costs while improving healthcare quality. The ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards recently released is the first step towards interoperability of mobile medical devices used in patient environments.
A successful introduction and usage of mobile e-health systems on a large scale hinges on two key factors: interoperability and security. ISO/IEEE recently published the final version of the 11073 family of standards which ensure interoperability of data transmission, monitoring and controlling of vital signs between mobile medical devices used in a Personal Area Network (PAN). These specifications do not, however, comprise any security procedures on identity management and data encryption.
As a rising number of patients are moving towards homecare, there is a growing need for creating PANs for mobile medical devices. The usage of this type of network is also contingent on security factors. The clinical data measured, transmitted and archived centrally, must be correctly assigned to the patient using the medical device and not to anyone else.
The lecture presents a research proposal for enhancing the ISO/IEEE 11073 family of specifications through a novel, authentication procedure. The authentication is based on a mutual authentication technique which uses fingerprint biometric information. The research addressed also the difficult challenge of developing an adequate algorithm for generation a biometric key based on fingerprint image.
The implementation results demonstrates that the proposed authentication solution is very easily embeddable into the existing ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 Optimized Exchanged Protocol (OEP) standard.