Mobile health tools: They're plenty in number, but most are just not secure.
One Dartmouth computer science professor and researcher is working to change that. David Kotz, champion international professor in Dartmouth's computer science department - who said he never intended to work on mHealth security - is now doing exactly that, leading a research project to address an area often considered to be grossly lacking.
We caught up with Kotz, who will be speaking at the Healthcare IT News Privacy & Security Symposium, taking place at the mHealth Summit on Sunday, Dec. 7, near Washington, D.C., to hear more about his research and what he hopes to see with mHealth network and data security.
Q: Your most recent research focuses on security for wearables and sensors. Could you tell us what you'll be talking about at the Privacy & Security Symposium this December?
A: I'm going to talk about one of my projects in particular, called 'Amulet,' which is a research-orientated effort to look at wrist wearable devices that are meant for body area mobile health sensing. So applications that might run on our platform would likely communicate with sensors or other devices that are worn on the body or are used near the body and aimed at various kinds of health-related monitoring or management activities, like a diabetic monitoring their glucose levels or their diet, or a cardiac heart failure patient monitoring their blood pressure and weight, and maybe some intake. Things like that. Or maybe an athlete who is monitoring their various fitness levels.
Sometimes a person has multiple applications that they need or want to perform, and so our platform, which we envision as sort of a bracelet, will run these applications, communicate with other body area sensing devices and provide the user some data either directly or indirectly through some back-end system. And our focus is on the security and privacy aspect, so how do you make it possible for multiple applications to run on a single platform like that without interfering with each other, without being hampered by some wireless attacker or exposing personal information to wireless eavesdroppers? And although it has some properties of a smartwatch – some of the newer ones can run multiple applications – ours is intended to be completely open for research purposes and also security-focused, health-focused, not just, you know, showing you your text messages. And also the other big difference is it will be distinct, or let's put is this way: It would be able to be operated or to operate, do its business, without a smartphone present.
