Data Security Mechanisms, Approaches, and Challenges for e-Health Smart Systems

In the new era, the trend of using wearable devices and smart accessories gained considerable popularity and become a necessity utility for human life due to their major role to keep monitoring health conditions and providing healthcare services. The combination of IoT networks with edge computing paradigms develops an intelligent e-health system that aims to monitor different real-time scenarios. The deployment of an e-health system exposes several challenges regarding the security and privacy aspects, particularly in the case of dealing with an enormous quantity of medical data and the risk presented by exchanging operations with external entities. In this paper a comprehensive presentation covered the basic topics of e-health system layers thus the advantages and limitations in terms of existing challenges has been mentioned, subsequently, adapted to the exposed cyber risk through the traditional systems in exchanging medical data, a discussion of the blockchain technology come over for new application opportunities, where this approach efficiently ensure the security of data transactions over the network, in addition, an overview outlined the main research works related to this technology. Therefore, a presentation study of diverse works reveals different security framework solutions related to e-health system’s layers, furthermore, uncovering the benefits of integrating intelligent technologies such as Machine Learning (supervised, and unsupervised types), Deep Learning, and Reinforcement Learning as well as introducing a comparison analysis of multiple AI algorithm models based on their efficiency for future deployment related security purposes to provide a smart healthcare monitoring system that meets patient needs. The end of this review highlighted further research directions and the actual open challenges regarding the e-Health system’s limitations.