Performance evaluation of an enhanced cryptography solution for m-Health applications in cooperative environments

Abstract

Mobile health (m-Health) applications delivers healthcare services through mobile applications regardless of time and place. An m-Health application makes use of wireless communications to sustain its health services and often providing a patient-doctor interaction. Therefore, m-Health applications present several challenging issues and constraints, such as, mobile devices battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, network delays, and of most importance, privacy and confidentiality concerns. This paper proposes a novel and enhanced cryptography solution in a cooperative environment considering a novel and early-proposed cooperation strategy for m-Health Applications. This proposal aims to face the challenges related to privacy and security issues of all forwarded and retrieved data concerning user sensitive information. Furthermore, it presents a performance evaluation of this proposal considering a comparison with an earlier proposed encryption strategy for the same cooperative environment.