Exploring a New Security Framework for Remote Patient Monitoring Devices

Abstract

Security has been an issue of contention in healthcare. The lack of familiarity and poor implementation of security in healthcare leave the patients’ data vulnerable to attackers. The main issue is assessing how we can provide security in an RPM infrastructure. The findings in literature show there is little empirical evidence on proper implementation of security. Therefore, there is an urgent need in addressing cybersecurity issues in medical devices. Through the review of relevant literature in remote patient monitoring and use of a Microsoft threat modelling tool, we identify and explore current vulnerabilities and threats in IEEE 11073 standard devices to propose a new security framework for remote patient monitoring devices. Additionally, current RPM devices have a limitation on the number of people who can share a single device, therefore, we propose the use of NFC for identification in Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) devices for multi-user environments where we have multiple people sharing a single device to reduce errors associated with incorrect user identification. We finally show how several techniques have been used to build the proposed framework.

Keywords

• telehealth security
• telemedicine security
• remote patient monitoring security