Cyber Physical Security Solutions for Pervasive Health Monitoring Systems - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 147

PHMS is a cyber-physical system made up of:
cyber-elements (monitoring sensors, actuators,
sink entity), physical process (human body) tightly
coupled together (sensors collecting data from the
body, introducing changes to it by actuation, the
human body providing the cyber elements energy
to function). The physical process is responsible
for performing some task of utility, the execution
of which affects and is affected by the comput-
ing capability. The computing or cyber element
on the other hand monitors the behavior of the
physical process, and actuates actions to change
its (process's) behavior, if needed.
The health management capability of pervasive
healthcare systems makes them ideal for many
diverse applications (Varshney, 2003) including:

they can be studied by the patients' care-
givers to provide better care. Such large
data sets can be useful for studying issues
such as response to medicine, demograph-
ics of people with specific ailments, pos-
sible improvements in the care, improve-
ment in medicine, alternative treatments
and diagnosis.

Conceptually, the model consists of three main
planes: the sensor plane, the data management
plane, and the knowledge generation plane. The
sensor plane is used to collect medical data from
patients and perform preliminary processing on
it. It consists of large number of tiny wireless
sensors which possess the capability to collect
physiological data such as electrocardiogram,
blood pressure, body temperature, galvanic skin
resistance, and activity detection along with envi-
ronmental parameters including ambient tempera-
ture, and humidity. Such sensors come in various
forms including wearable (Lukowicz, Anliker,
Ward, Trster, Hirt, & Neufelt, 2002) (Shnayder,
Chen, Lorincz, Fulford-Jones, & Welsh, 2005)
implantable (Medtronic, 2010) and fabric based
(Paradiso, Loriga, & Taccini, 2005). The sensors
are deployed on patients in both in-vivo and in-
vitro manner. The data collected by the sensors
is forwarded through a wireless channel to a sink
entity called the base station. The sensors usually
form a wireless network on the patient body to
forward their data to the base station. We call
the network of sensors as Body Area Networks
(BAN). The base station itself is located in the data
management plane. The data management plane
is populated with multiple information systems
implemented using computational devices such
as PDA, cell-phones, PCs and server depending
upon the requirement. It is responsible for the
infrastructure for managing the health data col-
lected by the sensors. It provides facilities for
organizing pre-processed health data from sensors
into a structured electronic format (also known
as Electronic Health Records (EHR)), and storing

• Mobile telemedicine : Provides the abil-
ity to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients
from a distance. This reduces the chances
of medical errors and enables timely treat-
ment of patients by providing accurate,
real-time, and complete health information
to the medical professional.
• Lifestyle management : Pervasive health-
care systems have the ability to provide
personalized care. For example, it can be
used by people to improve their health by
developing specialized meal and exercise
plans.
• Disaster response : Provides the ability
to respond effectively to disasters, where
the numbers of patients far exceeds the
number that can be handled by the avail-
able medical staffs. Using an appropriate
pervasive healthcare system, patients can
be automatically monitored and doctors'
attention can be brought to only those pa-
tients who are critical, thereby improving
the effectiveness of the response.
• Data repository: Pervasive healthcare sys-
tems are designed to collect data from pa-
tients over long periods of time. These data
are stored in an organized manner so that