Privacy Preserved Medical Service Provider Selection in Cloud-based Wireless Body Area Network

Continuous health status monitoring of the medical user (MU) with cloud-based wireless body area network (WBAN) is a key emerging technology in e-healthcare. Using this technology, WBAN continuously uploads the present physiological parameters to cloud. Cloud analyzes the private health information (PHI) of MU and detects any medical emergency of the MU instantly. Cloud checks the infrastructural parameters including the location information of all MSPs connected to the system and it selects the most appropriate MSP to address the medical emergency. This MSP selection task has to be performed efficiently so that privacy of PHI and location of MU is preserved. In the existing work, a trusted third party, namely, trusted authority (TA) actively participates in the emergency detection as well as in MSP selection process. This involvement of TA may compromise the privacy of MU as well as makes the system suffer from single-point failure problem. Furthermore, the existing work suffers from false positive medical emergency. The aim of the present work is to propose a framework that preserves the privacy of MU, eliminates the role of TA during medical emergency detection and MSP selection process to overcome single-point failure problem, and to ensure that it does not generate false positive emergency alert. The most appropriate MSP selection for an MU is obtained using Euclidean distance between MU and MSP attributes, computed in encrypted domain using homomorphic encryption. The proposed scheme has been scrutinized through an adversary model and simulated using ProVerif tool and found to be secured and privacy-preserving. Results of simulation shows that the time taken by MU in present work during medical emergency detection phase is better in comparison to the existing work. Therefore, the proposed framework can be widely adopted for deployment in smart healthcare.