A security framework for mobile health data collection.

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Iwaya, Leonardo Horn
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Computação móvel; Electrical engineering; Engenharia elétrica; Health; Informação (Segurança); Information (Security); Mobile computing; Saúde; Telemedicina; Telemedicine
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/3/3141/tde-23122014-143956/

Mobile health (mHealth) can be defined as the practice of medicine and public health supported by mobile computing technologies, such as mobile phones, PDAs, tablets, sensors and other wireless devices. Particularly in the case of mobile phones, there has been a significant increase in the number of lines, equipment, and network infrastructure in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC), allowing the adoption of mHealth systems efficiently. There are now several cases of systems for data collection focused on primary care, health surveillance and epidemiological research, which were adopted in these countries. Such systems provide health care managers information with higher quality and in a shorter time, which in turn improves their ability to plan actions and respond to emergencies. However, security is not included among the main requirements of such systems. Aiming to address this issue, we developed a survey about mHealth applications and research initiatives in Brazil, which shows that a reasonable number of papers only briefly (13%) or simply do not mention (40%) their security requirements. This survey also provides a discussion about the current state-of-art of Brazilian mHealth researches, including the main types of applications, target users, devices employed and the research barriers identified. After that, we present the SecourHealth, a security framework for mHealth data collection applications. SecourHealth was designed to cope with six main security requirements: support user registration and authentication mechanisms; treat network disconnections and delays; provide a secure data storage - even in case of possible theft or loss of equipment; allow secure data exchange between the device and server; enabling device sharing between users (i.e., health workers); and allow trade-offs between security, performance and usability. This thesis also describes in detail the framework modeling and development steps showing how it was integrated into an application for the Android platform. Finally, we benchmarked the cryptographic algorithms implemented, when compared to the overhead of using HTTPS protocol.