Wearable technology and health care

Equipped with a three-year, $322,800 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grant beginning in 2015, UNSW engineers hope to make wearable devices secure enough to feed the information they collect into the mainstream health system.

This could allow doctors to monitor the health of patients in their own homes or provide a greater level of detail to improve diagnosis and decision-making.

A significant opportunity exists to curtail the growing demands on our healthcare system by engaging patients in at-home medical management using emerging wireless sensor technology, said Associate Professor Vijay Sivaraman from the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications.

The researchers are proposing a series of lightweight security enhancements to enable wearable devices to play a more critical role in health management.

“Security is a vital concern that needs to be solved in order for wearable healthcare devices to be deployed at large scale within the healthcare system,” said Professor Sanjay Jha, director of the Cyber Security and Privacy (CySPri) Laboratory at the School of Computer Science and Engineering. Jha is also deputy director of the Australian Centre for Cyber Security (ACCS) at UNSW. According to Jha, encrypting information that is sent wirelessly from the wearable device is only the first step.

“If healthcare professionals and medical insurers are to trust the data coming from wearable devices, they also need to be confident that the provenance, namely the context - the person, time and place associated with the data - is genuine, that the device integrity has not been compromised by malware and that the data has not been tampered in transit or storage,” he said.

“The outcome of this project is expected to be the development and demonstration of ultra-lightweight algorithms and mechanisms that execute in wearable devices to safeguard the integrity of the data.”

It is anticipated that the technology developed will work with existing wearable devices, making it simple for device makers to incorporate.