(Authors ’ pre-print of DOI 10.1007/s11036-013-0447-x) Hide-n-Sense: preserving privacy efficiently in wireless mHealth

Abstract As healthcare in many countries faces an aging population and rising costs, mobile sensing technologies promise a new opportunity. Using mobile health (mHealth) sensing, which uses medical sensors to collect data about the patients, and mobile phones to act as a gateway between sensors and electronic health record systems, caregivers can continuously monitor the patients and deliver better care. Furthermore, individuals can become better engaged in mon-itoring and managing their own health. Although some work on mHealth sensing has addressed security, achieving strong privacy for low-power sensors remains a challenge. We make three contributions. First, we propose an mHealth sensing protocol that provides strong security and privacy properties at the link layer, with low energy overhead, suit-able for low-power sensors. The protocol uses three novel techniques: adaptive security, to dynamically modify trans-mission overhead; MAC striping, to make forgery difficult even for small-sized Message Authentication Codes; and asymmetric resource requirements, in recognition of the lim-ited resources in tiny mHealth sensors. Second, we demon-strate its feasibility by implementing a prototype on a Chronos wrist device, and evaluating it experimentally. Third, we pro-vide a security, privacy, and energy analysis of our system