Context Aware Trust Management Scheme for Pervasive Healthcare

Medical sensor nodes are used in pervasive healthcare applications like remote patient monitoring, elderly care to collect patients vital signs for identifying medical emergency. These resource restricted sensor nodes are prone to various malicious attacks, data faults and data losses. Presence of faulty data, data loss in collected patient data may lead to incorrect analysis of patient condition, which decreases the reliability of pervasive healthcare system. The aim of this work is to alert the caregiver and raise the alarm only when the patient enters into medical emergency situation. The proposed scheme also reduces the false alarms and alerts caused by data fault and misbehaving sensor nodes. To achieve this, we introduce a context aware trust management scheme for data fault detection, data reconstruction and event detection in pervasive healthcare systems. It employs heuristic functions, data correlation and contextual information based algorithms to identify the data faults and events. It also reconstructs the data faults and data loss for identifying patient condition. Performance of this approach is evaluated with the help of real data samples collected by medical sensor network prototype of remote patient monitoring application. The experimental results show that the proposed trust scheme outperforms state-of-the-art techniques and achieves good detection accuracy in data fault detection and event detection.