A Study of Security Requirements in Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Home Healthcare Systems

Abstract

Smart home healthcare are systems used to monitor patient in home by expecting and responding to their needs and granting their independence. This remote patient's monitoring is becoming more feasible as specialized sensors can be placed inside homes. In fact, wireless sensor network are used to collect medical data such as vital signs and personal data to transmit it to the caregiver. Therefore, the preserving security and privacy of this sensitive information is very crucial. This is particularly challenging because of the specific characteristics of WSN (e.g. limited resources: energy, storage, computation, communication) and the specific smart home environment. This paper tends to analyze the security related issues in smart home healthcare systems and proposes security requirements for these systems. We highlight the security threats for networks in healthcare, discuss issues related to the existing security systems and also present the proposed and derived requirements of security in this context.