Data Encryption as Security Measure in IoT-Enabled Healthcare

Wearable and implantable IoT medical devices like glucose meters, blood pressure cuffs, defibrillators and other sensors and devices are used in today’s patients monitoring systems as a part of digital health initiative. This is an important measure taken up by healthcare industries and organizations, and this would go on well as long as trouble creators called medhackers do not meddle with patients’ data for disruptive purposes. Information transaction of sensed medical data among patients and healthcare professionals is usually carried out via wire or wireless media or via intranet, Internet and dedicated channels. Most of the regular hackers intercept data transfer in Internet for economic and political gains, whereas medhackers who are psychos intercept and manipulate medical data for vengeance and possibly for sadistic self-gratification. In any case, IoT-enabled healthcare system is not exempted from cyber-attack. A number of people have worked on solving this problem in order to ensure safe and secured medical data transaction in terms of firewall and enhancement of security in communication protocols. Not much work has been done in improving security using robust data encryption and possibly data compression techniques. In this context, this paper proposes reliable techniques for data encoding and compression in order to have considerable security in healthcare systems, which make use of IoT sensors and devices.