A model for a secure fully wireless telemedicine system

New wireless communication technology standards are being released every year. Wireless technologies merely differ from one another by their range and speed and can each be selected according to the type of application in use. Mobility and ubiquity are the main benefits that can be extracted by using those technologies. On the other hand, telemedicine is the use of communication technologies to provide medical care and thus avoid the usual face-to-face, physician-to-patient scenario. With telemedicine, a physician can treat a patient located at a remote site. Early telemedicine systems used technologies that were available at the time, such as the telephone. Integrating wireless technologies into telemedicine systems would surely provide a huge boost to the improvement of the delivery of healthcare. However, telemedicine and wireless technologies are both emerging scientific concepts. Scientific concepts always have to face challenges prior to popularisation. The more important barriers to the adoption of wireless telemedicine are security and privacy. Medical practitioners are doing their best to preserve the privacy of their patients. Disclosure of patients’ health information may lead to severe legal sanctions. Security flaws in a wireless telemedicine system would lead to privacy breaches. Patient privacy, which physicians have tried so hard to protect, would consequently be out of their control. This dissertation will achieve two goals. The first goal is to show how different wireless technologies could be integrated into telemedicine to provide different applications. The second goal is to design a fully wireless telemedicine system where the information of patients will flow securely. The model described in this dissertation shows a possible wireless telemedicine scenario using different types of wireless technologies. The model also proposes a solution to allow the secure flow of medical information in order to protect the privacy of patients.Dr. E. Marai