Secure and Efficient Mobile Personal Health Data Sharing in Resource Constrained Environments

Abstract

Personal health record (PHR) systems are widely used in the developed world, but little has been done to explore the utility of these PHR systems in the developing world. A key reason for this is that many developing world areas suffer from technological impediments resulting from poor infrastructure, low literacy, intermittent power connectivity, and unstable bandwidth connectivity. In technological resource constrained environments such as these, deploying standard PHR systems is challenging. Therefore, PHR systems need to be redesigned for usability and reliability in resource constrained scenarios. Additionally, the inherent privacy and security sensitivity of healthcare data makes re-designing the PHR systems to take into account the security and privacy requirements, a necessity. The goal is to opt for security mechanisms that offer the same levels of security as is the case in the standard PHR systems that are used in the developed world, but that are also lightweight in terms of performance and storage overhead. In this paper, based on the observation that mobile phone use is widely proliferated in developing countries, we propose an access control framework supported by identity-based encryption for a secure Mobile-PHR system. Results from our prototype evaluation (laboratory and field studies) indicate that the proposed IBE scheme effectively secures PHRs beyond the healthcare provider’s security domain and is efficient performance-wise.