A remote data access architecture for home-monitoring health-care applications

Abstract With the aging of the population and the increasing patient preference for receiving care in their own homes, remote home care is one of the fastest growing areas of health care in Taiwan and many other countries. Many remote home-monitoring applications have been developed and implemented...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Medical engineering & physics 2007-03, Vol.29 (2), p.199-204
Main Authors: Lin, Chao-Hung, Young, Shuenn-Tsong, Kuo, Te-Son
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ambulatory Care - methods
Availability of health services
Computer Security
Database Management Systems
Home care
Home Care Services
Information Storage and Retrieval - methods
Internet
Medical Records Systems, Computerized
Monitoring, Ambulatory - methods
Patient satisfaction
Radiology
Remote Consultation - methods
Remote-monitoring
Security
Taiwan
Telemedicine
User-Computer Interface
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Abstract With the aging of the population and the increasing patient preference for receiving care in their own homes, remote home care is one of the fastest growing areas of health care in Taiwan and many other countries. Many remote home-monitoring applications have been developed and implemented to enable both formal and informal caregivers to have remote access to patient data so that they can respond instantly to any abnormalities of in-home patients. The aim of this technology is to give both patients and relatives better control of the health care, reduce the burden on informal caregivers and reduce visits to hospitals and thus result in a better quality of life for both the patient and his/her family. To facilitate their widespread adoption, remote home-monitoring systems take advantage of the low-cost features and popularity of the Internet and PCs, but are inherently exposed to several security risks, such as virus and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. These security threats exist as long as the in-home PC is directly accessible by remote-monitoring users over the Internet. The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to improve the security of such systems, with the proposed architecture aimed at increasing the system availability and confidentiality of patient information. A broker server is introduced between the remote-monitoring devices and the in-home PCs. This topology removes direct access to the in-home PC, and a firewall can be configured to deny all inbound connections while the remote home-monitoring application is operating. This architecture helps to transfer the security risks from the in-home PC to the managed broker server, on which more advanced security measures can be implemented. The pros and cons of this novel architecture design are also discussed and summarized.
ISSN:1350-4533
1873-4030
DOI:10.1016/j.medengphy.2006.03.002