Toward Uniform Smart Healthcare Ecosystems: A Survey on Prospects, Security, and Privacy Considerations

A plethora of interwoven social enablers and technical advancements have elevated smart healthcare from once a supplemental feature to now an indispensable necessity crucial to addressing intractable problems our modern cities face, which range from gradual population aging to ever surging healthcare expenses. State-of-the-art smart healthcare implementations now span a wide array of smart city applications including smart homes, smart environments, and smart transportation to take full advantage of the existing synergies among these services. This engagement of exogenous sources in smart healthcare systems introduces a variety of challenges; chief among them, it expands and complicates the attack surface, hence raising security and privacy concerns. In this chapter, we study the emerging trends in smart healthcare applications as well as the key technological developments that give rise to these transitions. Particularly, we emphasize threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences of cyberattacks in modern smart healthcare systems and investigate their corresponding proposed countermeasures.